April 2023
Making Connections by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
I’ve just returned from overseas. A break between the old bit of life and what’s to come, this was meant to be a holiday, but it seemed to consist of mostly galloping from one place to the next with nice restful bits in between.
The last haul was a flight from Dublin, Ireland to Istanbul Airport (the largest in the world, and it felt like that) to Kuala Lumpur to Perth. Yikes. About a day plus of travelling in tight tubes tearing through the sky and racing what seemed like kilometres to new gates in airports and I got to wondering how many people simply don’t make it, and die inside terminals to maybe be found and maybe scraped up and declared finished.. They’re not called terminals for nothing.
In amongst it all, some lovely highlights: connection with old friends in Germany and the making of new friends in The Shetland Islands. There was one day, just one, when the rain stopped, the fog lifted, and it was sunny and my two new friends and I took the plunge and swam in the freezing Atlantic. The water was crystal clear, smooth and lovely to look at, but God it was cold, very cold. All this was helped along by the fact that these two women are English medicos and, if anything untoward happened, we would look after one another. These sorts of connections are like that. They link us together gently in our humanity.
Our swim was followed by a warm car journey back to the Lerwick guest house, a shower, breakfast and laughter.
Then they went their way and I went on a minibus tour with a very knowledgeable tour operator, on my own, as in no other passengers. As I say, it was a perfect day: sunny, clear and amazingly beautiful. On that journey, I learned some of the history of the place, that the Shetlands were part of Denmark until 1472 after they, and the Orkneys, had been used as security for the wedding dowry of Margaret of Denmark, the future wife of King James III. As with most royal marriages, this was a political act. This was meant to be seen as a way of uniting Denmark and Scotland, following years of disagreements about taxation of the Hebrides Islands. The reasoning was that Margaret's father Christian of Denmark had agreed to a large dowry for his daughter's wedding and pledged the islands of Orkney and Shetland as security until the dowry was paid, as he lacked the funds to pay the dowry up front. It was meant as a temporary thing, but King James refused to let go of these islands, and so they remained part of Scotland. So, there was connection of a different kind, and driven by economics rather than friendship.
It's useful to remember that The Shetlands are just under 300 kms from Scandinavia (half the distance between Lismore and Sydney). The closeness of the islands to that part of the world is reflected in the old language (a seafaring mix of Old Norse and Celtic), and now again, in the architecture, with houses painted in the gorgeous colours of red, blue, yellow, and green.
Connections, in other words, can have different meanings for different people, and not all are those that nurture gentle friendship. Some are driven by power and money and these can get conflated for many people resulting in ideas that all connections between people are driven by self interest. Such cynicism comes up with statements like, friendships between men and women can’t exist, because both are only interested in sex and reproduction, something patently silly when you come to consider other deeper connections.
No, human connection is so much more than biological or economic drives. We all need a safe foundation for exploring our own worlds and being able to share our experiences in getting to know other worldviews. This is, after all, the first base to empathic caring for others as one cares for one’s own self being. This is the glue that unites us across the world, this is the common ground for a one world life.
