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AN ICY WALL(WITHIN AND BETWEEN): Relations and Compassion Fatigue All actual life is encounter. Martin Buber, I and Thou Life as Relationship In the movie Cast Away, Chuck Noland is a man who survives a plane crash into the sea and is washed up on the shore of a desert island. As his years alone on the island unfold, the audience is struck by the dreadful strangeness of the solitary human being.1 We are, as Aristotle claimed, political—social—animals.2 We need relationships and to be connected, even temporarily, with others. So much of life is experienced and is understood in relationship. Some relationships are seemingly simple. We stand in a checkout line to buy groceries. We move to ensure that we do not stand too close to the person ahead of us; we glance around at those near us, deciding whether to engage in brief conversation. Approaching the clerk, our relationship is heavily scripted; we exchange polite greetings: “How are you today?” he asks; “Fine,” we reply. No other answer is expected or desired. We make our payment and exchange a brief thanks. Such interactions leave little trace and are quickly forgotten unless they break script. These thin connections evaporate into the backdrop of our lives unlike those that approach the heart more deeply. For most of us, our earliest experiences of relationships are situated within a family. It is here that we may share the deepest bonds to others that we will ever have. Even lifelong friendship rarely has the same impact, and when it does, we will often say of those friends that they are like family. Our familial bonds are the connections to others that we cannot deny, even 138 An Icy Wall (Within and Between): Relations and Compassion Fatigue when we want to do so. The relationship between parent and child, therefore , is our introduction to relational complexity. In family relationships, we love, we revere, we struggle, we may even hate. And yet, however we feel about these relationships, we are bound to one another. At any given moment, the experience may be pleasant or otherwise. True disinterest, the absence of relationship, is rare, and when it is present it seems anomalous. The character Ryan Bingham in the movie Up in the Air is alone, not because like Chuck Noland his plane crashed into the sea, but because he essentially lives on airplanes (“Last year I travelled 350,000 miles. The moon is 250.”) and flies from city to city firing employees for companies that are downsizing.3 His motivational speech, “What Is in Your Backpack?” asks an audience to imagine all the people in their lives as being carried around: “Your relationships are the heaviest components of your life: the secrets, arguments, and compromises. You don’t need all that weight.” He is a stranger to his own family until he decides to attend his youngest sister ’s wedding. Strangely enough, he is the one to help his future brother-inlaw overcome last-minute doubts about marriage. Ryan asks the nervous groom to think of his most important memories: “Were you alone?” No. “Life is better with company,” Ryan tells him and the truth of his own statement dawns on him. In saving the wedding, Ryan earns a “welcome home.” Martin Buber, in his writings on relationship, says we become a “You” rather than an “It” “by entering into the world of relation.”4 Ryan has taken a step toward becoming a “You.” Family, particularly parents or guardians, provide the first experience of being cared for (or not being cared for) and set the stage for how each person will experience caring for others. In her study of motherhood , Vangie Bergum describes how a child is always present to his or her mother, even before the child is born. After the birth, the child still remains connected, in a sense, to the mother as the child stays always “on her mind.”5 This is so for adoptive mothers as well as biological ones; the connection is relational in its nature. The tone of the child’s presence to its mother is revealed further in the notion of caring as having worry implicit in it. Max van Manen, in describing care-as-worry, notes that care as lived in our closest relationships is an emotional response of moral responsibility .6 It is a call of caring responsibility, but a call that may be ignored when one is called upon or duty-bound...

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