“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” ~ Herman Melville
The last few months have felt a little like a Tyson Fury boxing match… one blow after another. There’s been news from friends and family of unexpected deaths, frightening diagnoses and life-threatening accidents. Throw in the usual collection of minor aggravations that are part of everyday life and you start wondering how much more you can take before the knockout punch arrives.
The phrase “it takes a village” comes from a Nigerian proverb about raising children. The implication is that child-rearing is a difficult and important enough task that it takes an entire village to do it well. It’s a nugget of wisdom that applies to several situations.
To borrow another adage, “many hands make light work.” When the grief is too big to carry alone, having a village makes the burden easier to bear. When the task is more than one person can manage, spreading the load makes it manageable. When a problem is overwhelming, many minds working together can find new ways to tackle it. In modern terms, instead of barn raisings, we have crowdfunding (for financial support) and crowdsourcing (for ideas and services).
Being part of a village both dilutes pain and concentrates joy; it makes life better and richer. No matter how independent we’ve been raised to be, how proud we are to stand on our own two feet, how determined to succeed alone, the truth is we need our village and we need to be good villagers. The tougher times get, the more true that becomes.
