I recently left a job of four years in Virginia to move back to Massachusetts where I lived for 17 years of my life. I left behind low-paying employment, benefits that left much to be desired, an inferior health care system and an absence of family. I also left behind a low-stress work environment, low cost of living, four beautiful seasons and, as I slowly came to realize my last week, many close friends.
Roanoke Virginia never felt like home and my wife and I had trouble making friends. Most people were either older than us, had kids or both. For the most part, my wife and I spent our weekends watching movies, drinking coffee at Barnes & Noble and mostly keeping to ourselves -- and that was fine.
Which is why it was so astonishing to watch how emotional people became as the days of my departure approached. A woman who worked on another floor presented me with a going-away gift that she had personally bought for me. Our interactions typically consisted of her asking if I had made any coffee that morning.
The office manager in my department, on three separate occasions, mentioned how much she was going to miss me, emphasizing the sadness of the Monday following my exodus. When picking up a purchase order from her office I would make small talk, but rarely did our communications go any further.
My supervisor's eyes became misty when the department treated me to lunch and he handed me a card with an almost-too-generous amount of cash. He had much more trouble reigning in his tears as he shook my hand on the last day. I borrowed his truck when moving a year ago but, for the most part, we never hung out when the work day ended.
Being a Navy brat, I was living in my fourth state by the time I was four years old. I left a close group of friends behind to travel seven hours to college in western New York. Four years later, I left my college friends, mostly from Buffalo and Rochester, upon graduation. Then, I left everyone when I got married and moved 600 miles away to Virginia. By the time I moved back to Massachusetts, I was quite comfortable with the concept of leaving people for an indefinite amount of time.
What I've come to realize is that, no matter how detached I feel, I am a significant part of other people's lives. When I voluntarily remove myself from their lives it is going to affect them (and I'm sure some people were happy to see me removed from theirs) in some way.
One of my criticisms of Ayn Rand's objectivism is her concept of autonomy. She believed that man should be completely free to pursue his own happiness. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is just one way of looking at reality.
It fails to put man into context and acknowledge the complex web of strings which attaches him to his community. The Buddist doctrine of dependent origination states that "phenomena arise together in a mutually interdependent web of cause and effect." We are all tied together by various degrees of separation, whether we like it or not.
I do agree with Rand's assessment that man's ultimate goal is his own happiness. However, it doesn't take a sage to realize that that goal is often impeded by the happiness of those around us.
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