In less time than it takes to aread a good book, the average person can transport himself several thousand miles away from everyone and everything he has ever cared for. The limbic brain registers the disorienting loss of attachments as the all-purpose ache of homesickness. Letters and phone calls are a salve on the wound, but they are insubstantial substitutes for the full-bandwidth sensory experience of nearness to the ones you love. To sustain a living relationship, limbic regulation demands sensory inputs that are rich, vivid and frequent.
Most therapists have in their practices at least one casualty of a calamitous move-the college student leaving home for the first time, the recipient of a distancing promotion or transfer-whose seeming psychhological health collapses under the geographic strain. Often no one is more surprised than the sufferer, who had no idea of his emotional frailty and the support networks of his native environs.
Our society overlooks the drain on emotional balance that results from severing attachments. from the dawn of the species until a few hundred years ago, most human beings lived out their lives in one community..The signature lesson of the twentieth century is that unforeseen complications are ever the faithful companions of technological progress. The convenient devices that enable extensive mobility are problematic.
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