Last Sunday, during a sweltering 92℉ day, we sought solace by picnicking in a park in central London, where we were joined by four families whom we’d known for 35 years.  We’d met in 1989 at an antenatal group, when I was pregnant with our first daughter, and we’d all had babies at around the same time.

We’d remained close friends with them for more than 35 years, and now our eldest girls (we’d all had girls, first time around) were all having babies of their own. And at the picnic, with one or two exceptions, all the second (and third) generations showed up to pay homage to our long friendship.

There we were, under the shade of a towering ancient tree, surrounded by our grown children and all our grandchildren, marveling at the extraordinary connections we’d maintained over all these years, and how we’d become, essentially, family – there for each other through good times and bad.

Over the years, we’d watched all our children arrive and grow, helped each other during two divorces, numerous financial crises, birth complications, cancer and hip replacements, nightmarish school issues, challenging teen years, all the sturm und drang of bringing up a child and holding a family together. All the sturm und drang of a typical life.

And despite numerous hardships, knowing all this support was there, every last one of us had all come out the other side.

Two of us are American (as are, of course, our children, who are dual nationals), and with July 4 approaching, I began pondering about America’s forthcoming celebration of independence.

The dangers of being left out

In the final years of the 19^th century, a French social scientist named Émile Durkheim was struck by a singular conundrum:  Why do certain social groups have higher suicide rates than others? Durkheim, one of the first academics to use a scientific approach to the study of society, had been drawn to the subject from an interest in whether societies could remain coherent and whole in the face of creeping ethnic diversity and the wholesale decline of religion.

It was Durkheim who first coined the term “social integration,” for even in those fledgling days of sociology, he understood that the fabric of society could exert a powerful force on the individual.  He was particularly interested in conditions in which the society and the individual were at odds with each other, and how this might predispose a person to kill himself, and he drew on this fascination in what became a classic study of suicide.

Even today, among scientists, suicide is largely considered a private affair; the individual’s reasons for doing away with himself are assumed to have nothing to do with the society in which he lives, and indeed most studies of suicide, even after Durkheim’s findings, have focused on individual motivation.

In his own work, though, Durkheim discovered that suicide rates were higher among people without strong attachments — the childless, single, widowed or divorced –  compared to those who were married or had children – which he considered hardly surprising, as those with loved ones were presumed to have someone to live for.

Eventually he understood suicide to be an extreme response to the severing of the social contract; as human beings need to be strongly attached to their groups, so those choosing to commit suicide do so because they have, for some reason, failed to be integrated into their society.

Suicides suffer from, as Durkheim put it, “excessive individuation.” In other words, people kill themselves because they feel left out; not fitting in is the one thing they cannot bear.

Even in those fledgling days of epidemiology, Durkheim understood that the solution to individual suicide lay in fixing the individual’s relation to society, rather than fixing the individual himself.

Right now, at this time of extreme polarization, when ugly prejudices are re-surfacing, when people have completely lost faith in politicians, when we really don’t know which way to turn, the best place to seek solace is not by celebrating independence – we have enough competitive individualism to spare in Western societies – but to seek and celebrate greater connection, to turn to the people closest to hand and make those ties even deeper.

Something about the promises we make to each other may carry more weight than the promises we make to ourselves. They give us the courage to remove the impediments lying across our tracks with greater ease.

All the members of this long-standing friendship group of mine have just one single thing in common – we all believed in natural births and chose an obstetrical team to facilitate this  – but our lives and many of our beliefs have taken very different paths.  We have different incomes, different political views. Our daughters have different beliefs and lives, but they, like we, revel in the deep, connected history of having known each other before they were even born. I have pictures of them as babies, stroking each other’s faces – possessing some deep and automatic knowing of this special relationship.

Support and connection are conditions as necessary to the human spirit as oxygen is to the human body. The most fundamental promise we make to each other, the most basic of our social contracts, is to support each other through adversity. I will be your witness.

At every point of our lives we need to know, that somewhere out there, somebody’s got our back, and this knowledge becomes a larger certainty in our lives when a group of people who were strangers (as ours were) come together and stay there.

This holiday weekend, don’t celebrate independence.  Try not to surround yourself with people who believe exactly what you believe.  Find your greatest power – and your greatest satisfaction – in numbers.

You’ll get by with a little help from your friends.