The Newtown Bee is seeking residents to share short essays on observations of this world — and what is good — in unsettled times. We bring you the following contribution from John Godino, the first of what we hope will be several to be considered for publication at newtownbee.com.

By John Godino

This whole “social distancing” thing should be easy for us. Social distancing is not the same as quarantine. Quarantine is being confined to your home and not being able to leave in any capacity. That, for any person, is always going to be tough. Social distancing is just staying at home for most of the day, working from home if possible and keeping away from others, but having the option to leave your house. That is a good amount of freedom with a pandemic going on.

We have all the content and entertainment we could ever want or need right at our fingertips for ten bucks a month or less. We have easy means of communication that are more personal and intimate than anything previous generations ever had. We have endless ways to improve ourselves like books that can arrive to us instantly online or home workout drills that can be found by the click of a button. And yet we are all going, some more slowly than others, crazy.

Now the over-asked question is, what is social distancing doing to us? What does that say about us as a people? I think the answer is pretty simple.

Maybe what social distancing is bringing out in us, in a painful, forcing-us-to-look-in-the-mirror way is that we need each other much more than we think we do. Maybe that’s the ultra-stripped down truth of why we feel like we are going crazy. For all that we think technology has done for us with FaceTime and chat services, we are still in desperate need of each other. Not an image on a screen, or disembodied voice, but the person. As modern people, many of us would like to think ourselves above such base urges, and yet here we are, desperately hoping this ends so we can just be around each other again. Ignore the introverts who say “I’ve been training for this my whole life, ahahahaha,” because soon they will be pining for the opportunity to just have lunch with another human person.

We thought ourselves advanced, constantly connected and together. But this crisis has shown us that the old ways of doing things are still the ways that fulfill us the most. It has shown us that our attempts to modernize human connection are sorry replacements for the real thing. We are not as evolved as we thought we were.

And maybe that will be the silver-lining at the end of all this. When we all come back into the light, we will have hopefully realized that what makes us feel like ourselves is each other — that substitutes for real human interaction that we have been trying to fall on for years will never truly make us feel as whole as a hug from a friend or a handshake from a stranger.

I, for one, cannot wait to see my people again and to be surrounded by the energy that I have come to think of as home.