“Something there is that doesn't love a wall,” is how Robert Frost begins his poem, The Mending Fence. The poem reflects on what it means every spring that he and his neighbor meet at the fence that divides their two properties to mend the gaps that have formed over winter.

The fence was built presumably to keep everything between the two properties separate. And the poem’s narrator starts wondering why the fence is so important in the first place. Without giving it much thought, the neighbor repeats an old adage his father used to say: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Feeling a bit mischievous, the narrator says,

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’

Unfortunately, the neighbor doesn’t want to think about it. All he can do is repeat the old maxim, “Good fences make good neighbors”—without stopping to ask himself why, if fences are such a good thing, they always seem to develop holes. As if there’s something almost magical that remains determined to tear the fences down.

I mean, it’s one thing if what you’re trying to do is keep your cows from eating my apples. But all things being equal, shouldn’t we always be thinking of ways to assist that mysterious force in the universe that wants to knock holes in the fence between us to let us journey to one another without impediment?

Now, some smart person out there will undoubtedly point out that human beings get into big trouble when we don’t have good boundaries. Psychologists call this lack of boundaries enmeshment—I can no longer tell where you end and I begin.

Enmeshment is bad because in being wrapped up in other people we eventually lose ourselves. So boundaries, in some sense, are necessary. But knowing where you end and someone else begins is different from investing in fences and walls, the purpose of which is to prevent us from knowing one another at all.

“Human beings are political animals,” as Aristotle observed. He went on to say that “any person who does not need a community is either a beast or a god.” In other words, as humans, we were made for community. We need access to one another to remain human. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.

Apart from the necessary practice of preventing psychological enmeshment, we need more access to one another—not less. But so often, human beings are wall-builders—without a firm idea of who we’re “walling in or out” and to whom we’re likely “to give offense.” Walls. Fences. Borders.

Building a wall at our borders is a way of fencing out people who might scare us because they’re different. That’s why we have things like national borders.

And let’s face it, nobody does border crossings nonchalantly.

Going into another country, another jurisdiction. You become subject to another authority. People dress differently. They often speak different languages, embrace different customs, eat different foods.