What is particularly troubling about the social fallout and the many human casualties of rampant global capitalism is that there never seem to be adequate supports in place for people when they are needing them. Almost always it's going to be too little too late. This came up in my conversation with one of my clients the other day as he confided that she (gender confusion of pronouns intentional to protect client's privacy) wished he didn`t need the support of the respite centre where I am working. I replied that if supports such as what are offered here were more widely available to people while they are doing well, then perhaps such places and services wouldn`t be quite so necessary as they are now. A little anecdotal evidence here, Gentle Reader:
After years of government funding cutbacks in my field of employment which was home support, I eventually found it impossible to make a living at my job. Meanwhile, I was having a generally difficult time coping. I had friends but they were about as messed up as I was, so my life went sideways for a while. At that time I did have a vision for community. There were others interested in pursuing and realizing with me this dream. All we lacked were resources. We were all poor, precariously employed, if working at all, and our collective mental health was, shall we say...
Fragile?
We did spend a lot of time together: visiting one another`s homes, having meals and potlucks together, going out for coffee, enjoying long city-wide walks together and talking, endlessly talking about how clever and forward looking we all were. We had potential. This idea had potential. But we couldn't pull it off. We weren't strong enough. Some of us were living with or fighting mental illness or substance abuse issues. Others were simply too stressed out with the general demands of life to be able to offer much of anything. Others were simply too self-centred to want to give as well as take.
I think I was the only strongly religious or spiritual person in this loosely constituted group, so there wasn't really anything of a common vision or ideology or sense of spirit to hold us together, help us form a workable constitution and facilitate our growth and development as a real community. We still tried, we still did what we could and we did stay open to others who wanted to participate with us.
Then disaster hit all of us. I became homeless, others had other problems and tragedies to sort through. Some in our little group did harbour me for a while but the personality differences became too great to manage. We were all simply too burnt-out, wounded and emotionally immature to pull this off. We all spun off each into our own little orbit. And I ended up dedicating the next two decades of my life to becoming well and reconstituting my life into a form that could work without damaging me again.
I am back now. And again I am ready. But I am not going to attempt to form a new community. Too big a project for one person to take on. However...
There are things I can do to help prepare the soil, so to speak. I am starting to open up again to other people, not too much and not to too many. I am thinking of small things, small acts of kindness and courtesy, small acts of friendship. This is too big a work for one person to pull off. But there is such a thing as influence.
The idea is to not only seek or create safe places of refuge for others, but to become that, to incarnate that reality. No, I cannot invite the whole world to come and live with me. With my tiny, subsidized one room apartment I can't even shelter one homeless person, despite all my survival guilt, having myself been homeless for a time. What can I do? I can sow seeds. I can open my heart to others, in general. Out in the public forum I can be kind and friendly to others, if it simply means saying good morning to a stranger, or chatting with someone on the bus, offering my seat, holding a door open, being kind to a child. It isn't much, but it's a start.
What I am hoping is that as I do more, so will others, that somehow we can role model for one another and each with our resources, no matter how limited, can help create conditions, can help facilitate a sense of welcome, of refuge. Perhaps inviting a stranger to share a café table, inviting a new arrival into my home, being generous to my current friends and befriending new people.
It is going to take a lot of effort, though. For one thing, a lot of us are going to have to start getting our noses out of our handheld devices while out in public, at least long enough to get a sense of those around us. We need to start being more aware of one another in public places and to spend less time on social media which really provides nothing better than ersatz community. We have to start engaging more with one another. Even a meetup group is better than nothing, but just as the voting booth is not where our democracy ends, but its starting point, so are meetup groups but a starting point for forming community.
No comments:
Post a Comment