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In the film Cast Away, Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a Fed Ex executive who survives a plane crash and ends up marooned on a Pacific island. Alone for four years, Noland must learn how to survive on his own. Away from the creature comforts of civilization, he returns to the conditions of primal man. He makes fire from sticks. He catches fish with a sharpened stick. He builds a hut to protect himself from the elements. He paints figures on the walls of his cave. He measures time and seasons by the sun and the wind and the stars. In the effort to survive, he learns to become many things - a hunter, an artist, a weatherman -- even a dentist. But he still needs something else to make him complete.

Life is more than food -- minnows and lobster and coconut. Life is more than art, whether on the wall of a cave or the wall of a living room. Life is more than merely surviving. Life is also about relationships. Life is about friends and loved ones. And so we find Chuck Noland, abandoned to extreme solitude, recognizing the importance of companionship. Opening up some FedEx packages that washed ashore from the plane wreck, Noland finds a volleyball in one of the boxes. He paints a face on the volleyball with his own blood. He gives it a name, "Wilson". He talks to it. Near an open fire, he complains about coconut milk being a natural laxative. He complains about a toothache ("What I would do to have a dentist right here in this cave. In fact, I wish you were a dentist. Dr. Wilson.") He describes his love for crab. He brags to Wilson about the girl he misses back home. He discusses his plans for getting off the island and back to civilization. He argues with the volleyball, glaring angrily at it as the embodiment of all of his self-doubt as to whether or not they will survive a voyage on the sea: "And what is your point? . . . well, we might just make it. Did that thought ever cross your brain? Well, regardless, I'd rather take my chance out there on the ocean than stay here and die on this shithole island."

The night before setting out to sea, Chuck looks at the volleyball while lying down and asks,
"You still awake? Me, too. You scared? Me, too."
The following morning he straps the volleyball to the edge of the raft: "OK Wilson, Here we go. You don 't have to worry about anything. You just hang on."

Wilson is not able to hang on, however. In one of the more touching scenes of the movie, Noland wakes up the morning after a horrific Pacific storm and discovers that the volleyball is adrift in the sea. Frantically, he cries out, "Where's Wilson? Wilson, where are you? Wilson! Wilson!). Spotting the volleyball twenty yards from the raft, Noland instinctively jumps into the ocean ("Wilson, I'm coming!). But the rescue attempt is unsuccessful as the ball drifts further away, with Noland struggling to stay afloat. Coming up for breath, with one hand lunging for the ball, Noland yells, "Wilson, I'm sorry. Wilson, I'm sorry. I can't." The next scene shows Noland on his raft in the dark of night, mourning his loss with deep sobbing.

Why did Chuck Noland personify the ball? Why did an inanimate object suddenly become animated in his mind? Why did he grieve the loss of a figment of his imagination? Precisely because the human spirit is hungry for relationship. As God told the original castaway, alone in the island of paradise: "it is not good for man to be alone" (Genesis 2:18). And the poet John Donne wrote many years ago, "no man is an island". God made us to live in company with other persons, people with whom we work and play, tell stories, share hurts, confess our fears and savor the taste of life.