Expanding Our Tribe

Like any animal, human or otherwise, when I’m afraid, my first impulse is to withdraw and protect myself. And let’s face it, our current situation makes us all ripe for the fear response—not just for ourselves, but for the people we love. Our “tribe.”

Because I’m afraid of the coronavirus, I wear a mask when I leave my “safe space” and go “out”—as in my forays for food in “the wilds” of my local grocery store. Or for my daily walk, which I’m finding to be increasingly essential. In spite of my introvert nature, and as much as I enjoy solitude and love my roommate husband, our small apartment is beginning to feel more like a jail cell than a retreat center.

So I go for walks—which present their own danger. Up until a couple of months ago, in keeping with my book’s message, I was looking for opportunities to encounter and interact with strangers. Ironically, now I’m back to avoiding them.

Generally, I stay off popular trails where others are also seeking relief from being housebound, and I spend more time on streets with sidewalks where I can see other people coming and step off the sidewalk or cross the street to avoid a “close encounter.”

In the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, humans were confronted by the arrival of a space ship populated by alien beings. A question we might ask ourselves is whether we’re going to let fear of the coronavirus prompt us to treat our fellow humans as alien beings carrying a potentially lethal foreign virus. And there’s another question at least as important. Are we going to let fear of ideas, beliefs, and values that are “foreign” to us prompt us to treat those who hold them as “aliens” posing a threat to all we hold dear?

The task before us—the opportunity—in this time of a global pandemic is to expand our “tribe” to include not just our immediate family and circle of close friends and colleagues, but the entire human community.

Like it or not, we’re all in this together.