Great Party, isn’t it?

“Relationships are constantly evolving works-in-progress. They are four-dimensional, because they exist in time as much as in space. 

The past gives them strength, and the future gives them purpose.

 In her 2017 book Radical Happiness, the Australian academic feminist Lynne Segal argues that the individual pursuit of happiness is a deeply flawed concept because moments of joy and real happiness can only be found with others. As her book's blurb puts it, 'we have lost the art of radical happiness - the art of transformative, collective joy. [Segal] shows that only in the revolutionary potential of coming together is it that we can come to understand the powers of flourishing. Relationships are precious beyond their role in forming your individuality  because, as Segal points out, they are entirely necessary if you are to find life meaningful.

Once the importance of personal connections has been pointed out, it can seem so obvious that it hardly seems worth mention-ing. Yet when you go back to twentieth-cen-tury discussions about meaning, including such insightful and moving works as Victor

E. FrankI's concentration camp writings, you realise that the idea is frequently absent. In the twentieth century, we were so concerned with the ascent of the individual that we failed to notice that it was communal magic which defined us.

"Think of all this as like planning a party; Daisy suggests. 'You put on the right music, you invite the right people, you lay on the right food, you can do everything right - but you don't know whether or not it's going to work. 

You don't know if the hoped-for atmosphere will descend or if the party will become a living thing with a mind of its own. It could just as easily not work. 

Whether or not it does become a party is ultimately an Act of Grace. 

You don't know. You hope. 

You put the things in place, and it happens or it doesn't.'