The Importance of our Connection to Others

Why is connection an important value?  I have often worked with clients on the theme of self-reliance and how this, at times, deceptively limiting value can hold us back.  Take a plant in an ecosystem.  It doesn’t decide to reject the sun, and the rain and the soil because it needs to be self-reliant, it leans into the sun, it soaks up the rain and nutrients in the soil, and if it doesn’t it dies.  It is reliant on external forces beyond it, but would we argue that a great oak is weak for having done so, that in some way it is lacking, or deficient?