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There is a powerful idea hidden inside modern life: the idea of the independent individual.

I have my body and you have yours. There is a boundary between us, visible enough in the outline of skin, and each of us experiences the world from somewhere inside that boundary. I can never quite know what it is like to look through your eyes, nor you through mine. In that sense, individuality is real and deeply important.

But I have begun to wonder whether we have confused individuality with independence. To be an individual is to be a distinct being, with my own body, experiences, history, perspective and identity. Independence makes a different claim: that I can exist and function without depending upon other beings or systems. We tend to bundle these ideas together, as though being distinctly ourselves must also mean being self-sufficient and separate.

Yet they need not be opposites. I can be entirely myself while my life remains dependent upon countless relationships beyond myself.

In my previous post, We Were Never Outside Nature, I considered the curious way we speak about the natural world as though it were somewhere else, a place we might visit, protect or return to. Yet the closer I look at an individual human being, the harder it becomes to find the self-contained creature our language so often suggests.

Consider something as ordinary as breakfast. A piece of fruit on my plate appears to be a single thing, but its existence depends upon an extraordinary gathering of relationships. There was a plant drawing energy from sunlight, water moving through soil, microorganisms participating in nutrient cycles and, perhaps, an insect carrying pollen from one flower to another. There were seasons and weather, people who tended or harvested the crop, and others who transported it until eventually it arrived in my hand. Then I eat it, and something even stranger happens.

Something that was unquestionably not me begins to become me. The fruit is broken down, its substances absorbed and rearranged, some incorporated into the tissues of the body whose boundary seemed so obvious a moment ago.

Breathing makes that boundary stranger still. With every breath, matter from beyond my skin enters my body, participates in the chemistry that keeps me alive and leaves again in altered form. Water passes through me. Food becomes tissue. Cells are shed. Heat radiates outward. My body is not a sealed container protecting a fixed collection of matter; it is a living process maintained through continuous exchange.

And then there are the other lives that accompany us. The human body is home to communities of microorganisms, particularly in places such as the gut and on the skin. They are not simply accidental passengers. Some participate in processes associated with digestion, metabolism and immune function. I remain recognisably myself, but the functioning of the organism I call me takes place in continuing relationship with lives that are not genetically human.

None of this means that the individual is an illusion. I think that distinction matters. A tree is still a tree even though its life depends upon sunlight, water, atmosphere, soil organisms and countless ecological relationships. A bird does not cease to be a bird because it depends upon plants, insects, microbes, weather and habitat. Interdependence does not erase identity.

Perhaps it tells us something more interesting about identity: to be an individual does not necessarily mean to be independent.

The same becomes true when we move beyond the physical body. The mind I experience as intimately mine was also formed in relationship. I learned a language that existed before I did. Other people gave me words with which I learned to name colours, feelings, objects and ideas. Stories entered me. Knowledge accumulated across generations became available to me. Even the private thoughts I now form are shaped, in part, with conceptual tools I inherited from other human beings.

The more closely we examine a supposedly self-contained person, then, the more relationships begin to appear.

This is one of the ideas that keeps drawing me back to the Living Field Hypothesis. I am interested not in dissolving the individual into some vague notion that everything is one, but in asking whether we have underestimated the importance of the relationships through which individual lives become possible.

That question also changes the way I think about belonging. We usually speak of belonging as an emotion or a social condition. We belong to a family, a community or a place. We may spend years trying to find somewhere we feel accepted, understood or at home. Those experiences of belonging matter enormously, but beneath them may lie another kind of belonging that does not depend upon whether we recognise it.

A human being cannot construct itself alone. Long before I could decide what I belonged to, I was already participating in relationships—with other people, with microorganisms, with atmosphere and water, with food webs and ecosystems, and with an evolutionary history stretching unimaginably far behind me.

Perhaps separation, then, is not the condition from which humans need to escape. Perhaps separation is the story we have learned to tell about a condition of belonging that never actually ceased.

If so, reconnecting with the living world may not require us to manufacture a connection that has been lost. It may begin with something quieter: learning to notice the relationships that were there all along.

And perhaps that leaves us with a different question. Not simply, Where do I belong? But: How many lives, relationships and histories are already present in the existence I call my own?

Carol Walden
The Living Field Hypothesis

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