British paediatrician and psychoanalyst DW Winnicott famously suggested that there is no such thing as a human baby. What could he possibly mean by such an outlandish claim? Winnicott’s point was that the individual human baby is quite incapable of persisting without a connection to another more competent and mature caretaker, one who is capable of offering the services that the baby requires to survive (nourishment, warmth, shelter, protection), but which it is wholly incapable of providing itself. No connection, no survival; meaning that the human baby only ever exists as an aspect of a dyad or pair, and never as a separate entity.

Of course, this dynamic remains true for all of us, throughout our lives. Even the most diehard, isolated “survivalist”, grubbing out a meagre livelihood in the backwoods of the American northwest, imprecating all the while the evils of “big government” and the impositions of “busybody” agencies and institutions, manages only on the basis of his connections to the cultural history, manifested in tools and strategies and other human technologies, on which he draws as a matter of habit.

This basic connection with culture and the history that produced it is the great unspoken secret of humankind. Homo sapiens? Hardly. Where is the evidence for such a claim. Among the animal kingdom we are almost unique in our profligacy, lack of continence, and, by extension, unsustainability. Homo technologicus? That’s more like it. Indeed, our reliance on technologies is complete and unnegotiable. And did we invent any of these technologies personally, as individuals playing out our years on planet Earth? No – they came to us, gift-wrapped, through our connections with others.

But as Virgil reminds us, “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”. Not all gifts are worth receiving. How important it is, then, that our connections – and the gifts with which they associate – should be well-judged, sensibly managed, carefully maintained, and wisely kept.

Pause a moment from the churn of life and we discover that we are who we connect to, be they alive, long dead, or still to come in an imagined future. Choice concerning connection is revealed as the ultimate and most consequential decision; a choice made repeatedly in a creative life.