By: Emily Sinclair Montague

Being human. Much has been said about this condition, and whether you call it a mode of life, a factual statement, an incurable illness, or a practiced art, you’ll find plenty of people who agree with you. Most of the time, being human isn’t something we think about. Why would we? It’s background noise, a fact of our existence like the color of the sky or the law of gravity.

And then something happens.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

The forms this “something” can take are pretty varied. A hurricane comes and destroys thousands of homes. A terrorist attack comes out of nowhere and causes an entire nation to go into mourning. A novel disease with no known cure seizes the globe in a matter of weeks, turning daily life as we know it on its head.

Suddenly being human is on everyone’s mind. Suddenly it isn’t background noise at all - it’s a shared experience spanning every race, culture, and country in the world. What’s behind this shift? What makes so many diverse, outwardly different people have the same feelings, the same realizations?

This is a well-researched phenomenon. Crisis bonding, disaster altruism, collective empathy...it has a lot of names, and a lot of forms. Humans are a social species - this is a core adaptation that has helped us to survive for millions of years despite heavy odds. Our ability to bond and communicate kept us alive in the face of dangerous predators, natural disasters, or invisible enemies like hunger and illness.

As we formed civilizations, wielding agriculture to increase our numbers and create new technologies, our social instincts solidified into rules and norms. We built hierarchies, with some people at the top and others at the bottom. People were given roles to fill, labels to define themselves by, and laws to follow. In some ways, our lives became smaller. We were given the luxury of being apathetic about a lot of things, because real danger had become more and more rare.

In our modern societies, real life-and-death risk is a novelty most of us rarely, if ever, experience. Is there danger? Sure. We see it in news stories or through warnings on social media. We know what it looks like, where it lurks, and how to avoid it. We are insulated from it. And in many ways, our mortality isn’t something we are particularly aware of. Like our basic humanity, it’s background noise.

So when a large-scale crisis happens, we are inevitably taken by surprise. And when vast swathes of people are shocked at the same time, by the same danger, some of our oldest instincts come roaring to the surface. People stockpile and fight, panic and compete, but the deeper undercurrent is rarely conflict - it’s collaboration. And that, researchers say, is one of the cornerstones of being human.

Social connection is more than an adaptation. It’s a need, something we seek out with the same urgency as food, water, and shelter. When we feel a loss of control, when we feel vulnerable, the first thing most of us will do is seek comfort through other people. We reach out. We talk. We share our experiences, and we try to make ourselves, and others, feel less alone. When that vulnerability is expressed on a community-wide, nationwide, or even global scale, that need is magnified accordingly.

Vulnerability is one of the key ingredients of love. As University of Houston Researcher Brené Brown explains in her TEDx Talk, the ability to be vulnerable with each other is one of the foundations of human connection. And we are, quite literally, wired to connect with one another - down to a neurological level. What does this look like for us, right now?

Here we are, facing the dangerous, the new, the unknown. COVID-19 or “coronavirus” has swept through all of our lives so rapidly that we have all been scrambling to adjust. There is no cure as of yet, and people are dying. A lot of people. To top it all off, we are in many cases being forced - both by law and necessity - to isolate ourselves from other people. We are frightened, we are uncertain....we are vulnerable.

And so, that deep-seated need to connect does what it is meant to do in situations like this. It rises to the surface and pushes us to love, to help, and to reach out to one another. From the front lines of ICUs to factories in Detroit and overseas, from the bank accounts of celebrities to the computer screens of musicians, and from homes just like yours, people are reaching out. We are encouraging one another, lifting spirits in creative ways such as through song or inspiring slogans shouted from rooftops and windows. We are calling our loved ones more than usual, facetiming old friends, and talking to each other through social media.

It might be easy to take a cynical perspective and lament the “need” for tragedy to bring us together like this, but personally, I choose not to focus on big-picture questions like that. Instead I am looking around at how much love people have to give even in the depths of fear and anxiety, and I am filled with wonder at the incredible human capacity to simply be together. It is beautiful in a way we could never hope to express in words.

This is love in the time of tragedy, yes, but it is also love, compassion, and empathy in the time of being human. We are facing the kind of fear and lack of control that our ancestors have faced since we stood up on two legs, and we are responding to it in the same ancient, awe-inspiring way we always have.

So reach out. Be vulnerable. And most of all - remember that we’re in this together.

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Fem Word organization. Any content provided by our authors are of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Love in the Time of COVID-19