Behind the loaf of bread.

I can still feel the heat of that bread in its packaging. When we spent a week or so in Mosselbay it was a delight to discover the bakery nearby. On a nondescript street with a regular door, and barely a sign, this was not a boutique bakery. No French chairs and little espresso cups. This was a factory. Inside we saw people rushing around machines with conveyor belts, carrying the same bread that lined the grocery store shelves back home. This was was a Sasko bread factory.

The workers were kind enough to allow us kids to some buy loaves directly from them. The steam still fogging up the plastic packaging, which we had to open up before the bread got soggy.

Leaving the factory I couldn't help but grin. This is where Sakso bread came from. This was the same bread that fueled really weird conversations outside on that hot trampoline at Jacques's house, where we all took peanut butter and syrup sandwiches from a heaped plate. Seeing the brand, the final packaging, the moving machines, and the honor of buying loaves directly from them had all contributed to me feeling special, feeling connected. I knew where the bread came from.

Now as an adult, walking down the aisle of a grocery store I see the same Sasko bread but this time it's very distant, hardly worth a second glance. It's worse; I know these plastic wrapped breads are full of preservatives and who knows what else. Looking around, there are thousands of more brands and items in the store. All the same, some to my taste and some not. All overwhelmingly banal and disconnected.

Take a pause and a look around you, how many items do you feel connected to? How many decisions, stories, design tradeoffs can you see in the things you interact with. Things you are so wholly familiar with.

It doesn't matter if these things aren't connected to you. They're just things. But what matters is how you feel connected. These feelings of disconnect come from us being outside the world, looking longingly in. These hollow, unnamed feelings that we carry with us. That we're quick to defend. Like how terrible sliced bread is for you.

But we have a way of inviting connection in. With a little effort, we can reach out to people, places and things directly around us and learn more about them. Learn their stories, how they connect to the world. The more we learn, the more we become connected. The intimacy of story.

I love to go on about the Blue Zones, those hotspots aorund the world with concentrations of really old people. How community is the one surprising common factor, alongside the more obvious diet and exercise. Those octogenerins (and older) have lived their whole lives around their community, their stories together are so intwined that identity is wordless and descriptionless between them. They probably don't say "I'm Sergio and I'm Italina." They say "I'm Sergio, from the village of Oliena". From their community.

As we struggle with identity, I think of a room completely shut off from the world. In that isolation, we have no identity - we have nothing to connect with. Or a god of the stars, roaming the universe. Such space, so little people to talk to. No identity exists there either.

I don't think we'd ever want to be connected to all the stuff around us, not if we live near hoards of people and share in the abundance of consumption. Nor do I think we are destined to be monks who live in the high mountains alone. Paying attention to the seasons, watching the trees grow but paying no mind to people. Our sense of identity isn't with nature alone.

Somewhere inbetween these extremes is us, you and I. In there we are build connections and we live long lives.