Everybody Kneads Somebody!

God had a concern for mutual human support and companionship in His creation. His first negative assessment of an otherwise excellent and perfect creation in Genesis 1:31 was aloneness in His statement made in Genesis 2:18, “It is not good for the man to be alone . . .”

Aristotle had the same idea when he said, “Human beings are social creatures.” Indeed, we are like monkeys – we like to hang around with each other. John Donne, in his Meditation XVII, said, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Opanin Kwadwo Kyere, a seasoned marriage counselor, in one of his speeches, “Living with People” said, “Everybody needs somebody, somewhere, somehow, sometime.”

As humans, a greater percentage of our happiness in life is going to come from our relationships with other people. How well we get along with people, and they with us, largely determines the quality of everything that happens to us. Someone said, “You can’t live any better than you can love and be loved.”

In life, no one is self-sufficient; we are interdependent. The importance of people in our lives cannot be substituted for money and any other thing, no matter their status and pedigree. It is said, and I love it, “Things are to use; people are to love!”

Marriages become successful when wife and husband recognize and appreciate their need for each other. Without a wife, a man is not called a husband; and without a husband, a woman is not called a wife. A husband needs his wife, and a wife needs her husband. They are each other’s support bra – to keep each other firm and standing.

The mother and baby are close-knit. As the baby cries to the mother to be fed when it is hungry, so the mother yearns for the baby to suck when her breasts are full and heavy. They make an egg-cellent pair. When the baby milks well, the mother feels soft.

We depend on, connect and associate with each other for our survival emotionally, psychologically and socially. Unfortunately, the world is short of love. In fact, people are starving socially and emotionally and experiencing affection-deprivation or “skin hunger” because people are becoming less loving, caring and concerned of others.

Albert Schweitzer, the French philosopher and physician said, “The tragedy of life is not that we die, but is rather, what dies inside a man while he lives.” Many people die within every day because they are rejected and are not accepted.

Humans’ greatest fear in life is to be rejected. As a result, everything we do, the homes we live in, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the gadgets we use and the people we associate with are all part of our ways of yearning for acceptance.

The most wicked punishment you can mete out to people is to isolate them from others; bring them closer to people and that will be the happiest thing you have done for them. Everybody, no matter how secure they may seem, needs somebody: to love, to cherish, to appreciate, to lean on, to show concern, for encouragement and recognition.

Someone needs you to listen to them and smile at them to show that they are loved and cherished, to put an arm around their shoulder to offer comfort, and to hold their hands and tell them, “You are a sweet-tea. I couldn’t have drunk it without you!” Yes! A human being is a human being because of other human beings. Tell someone, “All I knead is your loaf to expand and grow . . . I need you!”

The writer is a Love & Relationship Expert, licensed by the Ghana Psychology Council as a Counselor [Lay Practitioner]. He is a member of the Ghana Psychological Association, and the Ghana Academy of Christian Counselors. Contact: +233 (0) 207295852