On what binds us | Ben Benson ‘25
Socrates said the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. When I read this quote, I honestly always think that it sounds a little bit dumb. But of course, it probably does hold some profound truths considering its so widely regarded, and voiced by maybe the greatest thinker of all time.
The other day I was walking to class and in front me at the corner of the brick wall that surrounds my house, and my attention was grabbed by a squirrel sprinting at seemingly full speed down the runway made by the top of the wall. It seemed as though it was running straight at me before it quickly veered on the rounded corner of the wall and lept some 5 feet in the air just a few feet in front of my face. It lept and met a lamp post that I had hardly noticed prior to this event, and before I could even register how it was able to catch itself on a shear vertical surface it had scurried to the top of the lamp post, leaping again some 30 feet in the air to another tree and out of sight.
It is in moments like these where I think I can empathize with Socrates. Where you have to take a step back and grapple with how incomprehensibly different your experience is from those things that are all around us in each moment. I can not possibly know what it is like to be a squirrel confidently leaping onto a branch not more than 3 inches wide 30 feet in the air at top speed, or what it’s like to be the tree into which the squirrel lept, or even what it’s like to be Walker, the friend I am sitting next to as I write this.
Even when I am with the person or people I am closest with in the whole world, I know that I can never truly, fully know their mind, their experience, their life. And yet I do know that there is something there. There is something between us, a sort of connection that even when you try your hardest to break it down to its smallest component parts there is always something in the explanation that fails to truly encompass that which “is”.
But despite all this, sometimes I do feel known. When I’m laughing with my friends, when I’m looking into the eyes of someone that I love, and even when my confidence is necessarily inspired by the bravery of a squirrel.
Countless artists, philosophers, and scientists have tried to tie a bow on what exactly it is that ties it all together. What it is that creates who we are, moves us in the right direction, and brings us together not just in our minds but also in our hearts. I’ve once heard it described and described it myself as the universe, as energy, as chi. But to me, now, that is God.