Well, Gentle Reader, I have to say that the pain and near suicide-inducing isolation I experienced over this Thanksgiving weekend is already yielding a rather interesting fruit. This seems to be coming out of a brief email exchange I have been having with a retired Anglican priest I know, a very dear gentleman, and I mean gentleman in the finest sense of the word. The exchange has been regarding the emergency contact information I sent out yesterday in case of sudden or unexpected death (mine) or hospitalization or loss of faculties or whatever. He wrote that it was good of me to not want my "community of friends" to be left in the dark. I responded that to call them a community of friends is a little bit generous as I have learned that I really have no friends, only acquaintances.
His reply? Rather interesting. He suggested that it's perfectly valid to just have acquaintances and to just muddle on with your life and that people of his parents' generation didn't appear to need friends outside of their marriages and families. I responded that in my case I have no family. The reasons why are indicated in other posts on this blog, Gentle Reader, so I won't bore you here with the details. But the lack of meaningful social connection for many older people, low income, without family and unmarriageable is something very onerous and needs to be addressed. Especially given that my particular demographic has one of the highest mortality rates, from suicide and other causes (Oh, don't you just wish, Gentle Reader! But I am nowhere near bumping myself off no matter how upsetting things become)
So, here, I would like to explore just where we might need, or want, to go with Community and Friendship. This is a bit of a minefield of a concept given that there appear to be as many understandings and definitions for Community and Friendship as there are those who have the understandings and are making the definitions. It is often hard to mention these very words to others because there is no guarantee that we are speaking or even thinking the same thing.
I will mention here the different images that the word community invokes for me:
There is the international community, also known as the United Nations. This is all about huge collectives under national flags agreeing not to bomb the bejesus out of each other and almost nothing to do with persons as individuals.
We have the national community, in our case the entity that is called Canada and the district communities defined by the provinces and territories and then there are the cities and towns along with the rural communities. These have little to do with persons and everything to do with the metaphoric and fictional identity we all share according to our nationality and our place within the nation.
There are also ethnic communities composed of Asians (Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese), South Asians, Latinos, Caribbeans, Italians, Middle Eastern, or pick any one you like. Then there are communities based on race: black, aboriginal; sexual orientation etc.
Other communities: online, disabled, mental health, artistic, creative, academic...religious communities, and on it goes.
We have communities that are neighbourhoods, communities that share the same sports interests, the same kinky sex interests, and then we have...
Intentional community which could be secular, political or religious or, other?
There is also the reality of living in community or in a state of community. This could be fixed at a precise location or it could have an organic quality based more on an attitude and quality of life.
No matter which way you slice it, community is collective and pertains to any number of shared characteristics, beliefs, qualities or interests that bind or unite people. It is not about individuals except in so far as individuals impact and define community, in which community impacts and defines individuals, and especially how these individuals impact and define one another...
Which leads us to the theme of friendship and I am going to explore this idea in tomorrow's blog post.
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