It’s a typical Saturday afternoon in the winter of 1974, and my mother, my younger sister, and I are wandering the halls of our town’s large shopping mall when, seemingly out of nowhere, a classmate from my second-grade class appears. Danny greets me with a warm smile. He shares, “There’s this great place in the mall where all the kids go to play. Wanna go with me?”

I feel a joy welling up inside me and look up at my mom with eyes lit by excitement. She gives me a nod, her non-verbal consent, and I excitedly skip through the walkways with Danny, all the while imagining our final destination: a large room filled with children jumping together in ball pits, running and chasing one another, each alive with vitality.

But when we arrive at our destination, there are instead six pinball machines lining the walls of a narrow arcade. Danny walks over to one of them, puts his quarter in the coin slot, and loses himself in a world of bumpers and targets. He instructs me to find my own pinball machine and do the same.

Here we are, standing side-by-side but not together, each attempting to earn our own individual high score, a foreshadowing of our upcoming lives in a marketplace culture…

For most of humanity’s 200,000-year history on this planet, we were born in a village setting. Anthropologists tell us that, arriving as children in our villages, we were welcomed into the world by adoring eyes and cradled by eager hands. With a chorus of voices, we were guided through the turbulent waters of adolescence. Throughout adulthood, we were taught to engage with one another in the sacred work of connecting with and renewing our planet (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021).

At the heart of each of these ancient villages, villages that slowly, organically spread across the Earth, was an ability to offer the security found in each other’s arms. It was the safe haven villagers knew they could turn to and be welcomed and comforted whenever they were frightened, wounded, or in danger. It was the secure base villagers felt confident boldly venturing out from to experience themselves and their world with a sense of vitality and wonder. These were special sorts of places where secure attachments served........

© Psychology Today