In 2003, during a period of change in myself and my life, I wrote and recorded a song called “Some Other Way.” Recently, a friend wrote to thank me for this song (and others on the same record), which sent me back for a listen. I hadn’t listened to or sang the song in years.
“Some Other Way” acknowledges the experience we sometimes have of changing and of needing our lives to change in order to fit the new person we are becoming. It acknowledges that we need our relationships to change, but we don’t want our relationships to end. While we are trying to be honest, we don’t want to lose the people we love in the process. Essentially, we need to love them “some other way.”
Seeking a Way Beyond Divisions
I’m always struck by the mutability of art. How it can mean one thing to us in a particular moment or era then take on a whole new meaning at another time. As I relistened to “Some Other Way,” the meaning of the song had split open. It now seems to resonate with altogether different situations I see happening around me.
I see people responding to splits in families as political divides deepen interpersonal rifts. I see people trying to keep alive relationships with neighbors even as perimeters of allowable discourse shrink. I see people leaving churches where they no longer feel included. I see people withdrawing into isolation because of conflict avoidance. I see people siloing off into homogenous information ecosystems.
Seeking Ways out of Loneliness
Friends, we need to learn to relate to one another in “some other way.” In ways other than we have in the past—since those connections have broken. They are past. And in ways other than we do at present, when we are connecting with one another far less than humanly possible and humanly necessary.
We absolutely need one another. We need to find new ways to love and connect with one another. Social scientists who study isolation and loneliness have found that isolation and loneliness are more potent killers than heavy smoking and alcohol abuse. Not to mention that social divisions are literally stoking across the spectrum escalations in political violence, literally killing people. We need to find some other way to live together.
What Will Be Our New Story?
We need a new story. I am very compelled by a new series from the New York Times “Opinions” podcast, a series based on the assumption that Americans develop new stories periodically, and that we need to think deeply about what our next American story will be. They are asking different individuals to offer up visions for that story. We are story-telling creatures, as my lit-professor husband likes to say. Individually, we need motivating, meaning-generating stories. Collectively, we need such stories.
Clearly, the story America has been telling for a while leads us into dark places. Stories help us to generate and inhabit and translate meaning and experience. What are stories that might help us generate and inhabit unity across difference? What are stories that might unify us regarding what it means to be American?
The Challenge of Staying Honest But Connected
Sometimes, I hear older people reminisce about times when they did not know the political leanings of their neighbors. It simply didn’t matter to people as much as it does today. This did not mean people didn’t have convictions or religious/ideological differences or that people had to be dishonest about who they were (though some groups surely had to for their own safety). Instead, more Americans apparently believed “what unites us is bigger than what divides us.” Apparently more people had a shared story or stories.
This is not to gloss over problems and injustices or to glamorize the past. All was not harmonious; there was conflict. But conflict is groups and relationships is normal, as long as people can address societal conflict in nonviolent ways using mechanisms like the law and government on the macro level, and grassroots change-formation and persuasion on the micro level.
Today’s realities are dramatically different because of technology, media bifurcation, and the devolution of institutions that brought people together across difference. Still, I have hope that we can write a new collective story anyway. We must. We’re going to need to learn to live together, to love one another “some other way.” And that is a spiritual undertaking.
Here is my song:
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Wren, winner of a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal
Winner of the 2022 Independent Publisher Awards Bronze Medal for Regional Fiction; Finalist for the 2022 National Indie Excellence Awards. (2021) Paperback publication of Wren , a novel. “Insightful novel tackles questions of parenthood, marriage, and friendship with finesse and empathy … with striking descriptions of Oregon topography.” —Kirkus Reviews (2018) Audiobook publication of Wren.
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