We accept as a standard truth that we are separate from all other people: we are alone, we are individuals, we are each one of a kind.
We never truly understand what other people feel, nor do they truly understand our feelings. We are on our own, responsible for our own decisions and for solutions to our own problems.
We protect ourselves first, and at almost any cost. We live our own lives and die our own deaths.We accept as just as much a standard truth the opposite: that we are also interconnected. What happens to a friend seems to some extent also to happen to us. When friends are lonely or worried or in pain, we cannot simply ignore them; we even feel some of their misery. Conversely, when we are unhappy ourselves, the presence of a friend is a comfort and relief. “For grief concealed strangles the soul,” wrote Robert Burton, a seventeenth-century minister and scholar, “but when as we shall but impart it to some discreet, trusty, loving friend, it is instantly removed.”
These opposites seem to play themselves out every day. Every close relationship is a moving balance between the opposites of individuality and connectedness, personal necessity and friendly concern, privacy and warmth.