by Kare Anderson

Captain Eugene "Red" McDaniel was a navy pilot shot down in North Vietnam and then held as a prisoner of war for six years. In his book Scars and Stripes, he describes the desperate need of prisoners to communicate with one another to maintain morale. Prisoners risked death to work out a complicated communication system by which they would write under plates, cough, sing, tap on walls. laugh, scratch, or flap laundry a certain number of times to transmit a letter of the alphabet.

Captain McDaniel says POWs tended to die much sooner if they could not communicate with each other. On many occasions, he endured torture rather than give up his attempts to stay in touch with other prisoners, especially when he was in solitary confinement.

When we think of survival, we usually list food, shelter, and clothing as the essentials. But, as abandoned, untouched babies in desperately poor orphanages know, lack of attention leads to atrophy and death.

Even when we can see people often in our daily lives, we might not actually connect with many and thus feel emotionally deprived. For example, although maintaining a poker face gives strategic advantage in a game, sarcastic humor can spark immediate laughter, and brief, abrupt answers might make an immediate interaction more efficient, all of these forms of communication distance people from each other and freeze them at that distance in future communication. Always remember, love is the fundamental attractive process.

As Dr. Dean Ornish wrote in Love & Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy, "When we gather together to tell and listen to each other’s stories, the sense of community and the recognition of shared experiences can be profoundly healing." A popular saying goes, "Not everything that counts can be counted" (variously credited to people from British scientist Denis Burkitt to Albert Einstein). In a time-pressed culture, the undercurrent of sadness is how many of us also feel the twin phenomenon of being relationship-diminished — that is, as society becomes more transient and isolating, we do not feel known by many people.

Consider how you recognize and offer caring and respect in daily interactions. For example, do you immediately stop what you are doing when someone asks for your help or appears to simply want to talk about "nothing"? Does your face and body look relaxed and open when you are listening. or do you appear tense, judgmental, uncaring, and waiting to move on to the next task? If you are talking by phone, do your tone, words, and conversational pace encourage others to feel heard?

Dr. Rachel Remen, who has been in chronic pain much of her life and who teaches doctors how to be more compassionate listeners and complete diagnosticians, wrote, "The places where we are genuinely met and heard have great importance to us. Being in them may remind us of our strength and our value in ways that many other places we may pass through do not." As Candace Pert wrote in Molecules of Emotion, "Love often leads to healing, while fear and isolation breed illness. And our biggest fear is abandonment."

What we believe about ourselves can hold us hostage. According to Talmudic teaching, "We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are." When you support others in seeing themselves in a different, more giving and caring light, you foster their beliefs that they have within them that capacity and can cultivate it in their lives.

As we approach the millennium, we might be considering many goals, dreams, and measures of accomplishment, but perhaps none more important than how we can grow to cultivate closer connections with others. Contemplate how safe a connection you provide in uncertain situations, how comforting a presence you evoke in crisis, and how great a source of fun and laughter you provide during the little moments of life that, all too often, are spent rushing to the next task. Not just for your close friends but in the casual, brief transactions with strangers, consider how you contribute to our interconnectedness.

The Fijians are aware of a basic human law: We all influence one another. We are a part of each other’s reality. There is no such thing as passing someone and not acknowledging your moment of connection, not letting others know their effect on you and seeing yours on them. For Fijians, connection is natural. Don’t pretend that others are ships passing you in the night. How often do you recognize someone as that person — in that moment — wants to be seen, acknowledged, and known? By this recognition, you open up more possibilities for being truly known, expressing caring, as you bring others closer.

To learn more about the effect of close relationships on our health and emotional well-being, consider reading Dr. Dean Ornish’s Love & Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, Sam Keen’s To Love and Be Loved, or Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. For more information about Kare Anderson, visit her website at www.sayitbetter.com.