Our Bonds with Others
This week you will examine what it actually means to be bound to other people, not as a sentiment but as a structural fact of human life. Each day's passage adds a layer: from the widest circle of humanity inward to family and friendship, then outward again to a harder question about what those bonds demand of you even when the other person fails to hold up their end. By Saturday you will have a clearer picture of where your obligations come from and what it costs, and gives, to honor them.
Passage
In the next place, a man should consider that after a manner his brothers are parts of him, just as my eyes are parts of me; and likewise my legs, my hands, and the remaining members of my body. For brothers have the same relation to a family considered as one thing [as the parts to the whole of the body]. As, therefore, the eyes and the hands, if each of them should receive a peculiar soul and intellect, would, by every possible contrivance, pay a guardian attention to the remaining parts of the body, on account of the before-mentioned communion, because they could not perform their proper office well without the presence of the other members; thus also it is requisite that we who are men, and who acknowledge that we have a soul, should omit no offices which it becomes us to perform to our brothers. For again, brothers are more naturally adapted to assist each other, than are the parts of the body. For the eyes, indeed, being present with each other, see what is before them, and one hand cooperates with the other which is present; but the mutual works of brothers are, in a certain respect, much more multifarious. For they perform things which are profitable in common, though they should be at the greatest distance from each other; and they greatly benefit each other, though the interval which separates them should be immeasurable. In short, it must be considered, that our life appears to be a certain long war continued to the extent of many years; and this partly through the nature of the things themselves which possess a certain opposition; and partly through the sudden and unexpected occurrences of fortune; but most of all through vice itself, which neither abstains from any violence, nor from any fraud and evil stratagems. Hence nature, as not being ignorant of the purpose for which she generated us, produced each of us accompanied, after a certain manner, by an auxiliary. No one, therefore, is alone, nor does he derive his origin _from an oak or a rock_, but from parents, and in conjunction with brothers, and kindred, and other familiars. But reason affords us great assistance, conciliating to us strangers, and those who have no connection with us by blood, and procuring for us an abundance of auxiliars. On this account we naturally endeavour to allure and make every one our friend. Hence it is a thing perfectly insane to wish to be united to those who have not any thing from nature which is capable of procuring our love, and voluntarily to become familiar with them in the most extended degree; and yet neglect those prompt auxiliars and associates which are supplied by nature herself, such as brothers happen to be.
— Hierocles, Ethical Fragments 3.2
Reflection
Hierocles pushes the image of fellowship into something almost physical. Brothers, he says, are parts of you the way your hands and eyes are parts of your body. Eyes that each had their own soul would still look after the whole body, because they cannot do their job without the other members. Hierocles then goes further: life is a long war, battered by fortune and vice, and nature did not send you into it alone. She 'produced each of us accompanied by an auxiliary.' To neglect those natural allies while chasing connections with strangers is, he says flatly, insane. This is the week's sharpest challenge: you have auxiliaries already given to you, and you may be ignoring them.
Go deeper
Where in your life are you investing energy in cultivating connections with people who are essentially strangers to you while a natural ally, a sibling, a close kin, someone who shares your origin, is going without your attention?
Practice
The Auxiliary Check
Write the names of the people Hierocles would call your 'natural auxiliaries': siblings, close kin, those who share your origin and formation. Next to each name write one word describing the current state of that bond. For any bond you have let go cold, write one specific, small action you could take this week that is not a grand gesture but a real one: a call, a letter, showing up. Choose one and do it today.