Need for Old and New Roots
Names tell stories. So does my last name. Far from understanding its notions in Japanese, from Egypt, to as far as I know, central Africa the meaning of the name Atsu is: twin and sometimes even more precisely—twin if it is a boy. My maiden name, in contrast, means something like girl/pretty girl or kerchief in one of the old dialects used by some great writers such as the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905, Henryk Sienkiewicz (the author of Quo Vadis and the Trilogy—With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Fire in the Steppe) and Stefan Żeromski (the author of The Coming Spring, Ravens and Crows Will Peck Us to Pieces and Ashes.
Why do I mention this in an article about the need for community today? Because I am not only Anna A. Atsu.
I am the summation of not only my life choices but also of my past, genetically, ethnically, culturally, and in the lore of the people who lived so that I may live today.
The Need For Roots
To be rooted in a philosophical sense is to exist with a sense of grounding—both in oneself and in the world.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, argued that rootedness is one of the most fundamental human needs. In The Need for Roots, she describes it as the opposite of alienation—a deep connection to history, culture, and community.
Beyond the vapid fluff of memes, the attention economy, and frazzled daily lives, there is a longing. It’s echoed in posts, tweets, and between co-workers on a short lunch. We lack depth in our lives. And we don’t know how to reach into the barren soil of our social lands and begin to fertilise new roots of belonging.
Yet paradoxically, they force us to be rooted. The very forces that seek to unmoor us—consumerism, information overload, social isolation—also reveal our need for depth, for anchoring. The more we are stretched thin, the more we crave something solid.
The Need for Community
We always talk about family trees but we also have a friendship tree. We have our friends, and then the friends of friends, and then the people we don’t know at all (other trees).
I think of the loneliness epidemic as trees with only leaves and no roots. Our relationships with ourselves, our families, our friends, and the broader community are like leaves searching for nourishment. Many people have friends but complain they have no proper community. Our social roots are dangling in a breeze, searching for soil.
Our current social and economic culture has created a society of shallow communities. Disposable objects have led to disposable people, and dating culture has also become increasingly transactional and shallow. We ghost because we do not have deep connections or are unwilling to nourish them. Some friendships are considered expendable, too.
Many people struggle to find the time to nourish friendships and community alongside work and other commitments. Many people do not know where to look for friends, as social anxiety levels skyrocket among youth. Others have felt like outcasts most of their lives, having given up on efforts to attain deep, genuine friendships. What do we do?
What does deep community look like, then?
It begins with asking where we come from and how the stories of our ancestors have shaped who we are today. It is a privilege that not everybody has to be able to look back over multiple generations towards individuals who share their genes.
But even in a current setting we can ask, how have our parents, families, and childhood community shaped who we are?
This can be useful for self-examination, for rooting ourselves to our past, like in a marriage, for better and for worse. Taking the good with the bad and acknowledging all of it.
While I carry the weight of history—our struggle through centuries of partitions, war, and occupation—I also carry the warmth of Polish hospitality, the music of Chopin, Paderewski, Wieniawski, Szymanowski, Noskowski, Moniuszko (and many others — it happened that I lived in a district where all the streets were named after the famous composers), and the filmmaking of Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Roman Polański, Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Zanussi, just to mention a few.
In the long story of my ancestors, how will I become an ancestor that future generations will be proud of? How can I root myself in the story of my heritage while asking how I can have a positive impact on the society that I live in today?
Then we look at our present:
Who are we to our community?
Who are we to our family, friends and co-workers?
Where do our deepest connections form?
What connections are nourishing us, and which are merely filling space and time in our hectic days?
How can we deepen the bonds we already have?
Where do we find community if we do not already feel like we have one?
Perhaps we need new hobbies, a spiritual community, or non-profit community involvement.
Forming a deep community for me means calling, texting, seeing each other and much more. It means recognising interdependence over unrealistic independence or unhealthy codependence.
We need each other, much as modern society tells us the contrary.
The deep community also begs us to ask how our social lives today will affect future communities. There is, for instance, the Seventh Generation Principle, a concept rooted in the worldview of a group of Native American nations. It suggests that decisions made today should be weighed based on their potential impact on the next seven generations. Essentially, it's a long-term perspective that emphasizes the responsibility we have to ensure the well-being and sustainability of future generations, both in terms of the environment, society, and resources.
Are we making decisions that will make the world a better place? Deep community views healthcare, education, and resources as communal rights and necessities. It acknowledges that the isolation we feel is unhealthy and damaging, contributing to mental illness, financial insecurity, and even environmental degradation.
When we are rooted in our social sphere, our natural world, and in our historical context, we cannot help but feel it transform our existence. Our social, spatial and temporal lives need the soil, we are nourished by the minerals of our mutual belonging. If we forget this or if we discard this, we will only continue to nourish the rot of isolation.
Let’s end with three both powerful and beautiful quotes from three writers mentioned in this essay:
"Love conquers all, and we yield to love." (Henryk Sienkiewicz)
"One must have a tough character and a soft heart." (Stefan Zeromski)
“[W]e must have faith that the universe is beautiful on all levels...and that it has a fullness of beauty in relation to the bodily and psychic structure of each of the thinking beings that actually do exist and of all those that are possible. It is this very agreement of an infinity of perfect beauties that gives a transcendent character to the beauty of the world”. (Simone Weil)
