Alone on Valentine's Day

By Cameron Crane

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of reading Linda Booth Sweeney’s Connected Wisdom: Living Stories about Living Systems. I spent Saturday afternoon in my backyard, reading her beautifully articulated and wonderfully illustrated stories, which teach us a variety of lessons about living systems and our relationship to the world around us. She teaches us that everything has a place, and her stories help us to understand that even though we may question it at times, everything also has a purpose.

The next evening, I received a phone call from one of my girl friends in New Jersey. She was devastated. Her relationship of three years had just ended, and to make matters worse, she said, she was going to have to spend Valentine’s Day alone. No matter how much I tried to console her, she could not shake her overwhelming sense of loneliness.

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Suddenly, I remembered something I had learned in the very first few pages of Connected Wisdom. In her introductory statement, Sweeney reminds us that “like a spider’s web, a living system is so intricately woven that no part exists in isolation.” She gives us an example of a conversation amongst a group of 9-year-old students, who begin to debate whether we are a part of nature. Tom argues that we use nature but aren’t a part of it, while his classmate Christina argues that we are nature.

I realized then that my friend was seeing the world the way Tom did, the way that many of us do when we are feeling alone. Rather than seeing herself as part of the world around her, my friend was feeling outside of it. She had defined herself so much by one relationship- one system, that she had forgotten that she was an integral role in many other systems. She was still a daughter, a sister, a friend and a member of her volleyball team.

We are all involved in a series of relationships with our friends, loved ones, coworkers, communities, and nature. The loss of one relationship can give us the opportunity to strengthen these other relationships, and to contribute what we can to each system. If we listen to the lessons in Connected Wisdom we can see that we are never completely alone, even if we do feel lonely from time to time.
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Cameron Crane is currently a student at Dominican University of California, where she is studying Business Marketing and Communications. She was in raised in San Francisco, California. When she is not working or studying, she loves to go on adventures, spend time with friends and family, hike, exercise, paint, and write short stories. Welcome to the Little Pickle Press team!