Please forgive me. It has been 10 months since my last confession.
And today, I don’t feel like writing either, but for some reason I’m forcing myself to do so, to see what comes out. The title above, the inspiration to transform my blank page, are phrases that two friends have used in conversations in recent months. I’ll get to that in due course.
Thinking about these letters as a very slow (and often one-sided) conversation, I decided to start by reminding myself what the last couple of things I wrote said. I was – amused? Surprised? Inspired? Moved by a sense of continual entanglement? – to read that in August of last year, I wrote:
I’m left with a deep desire to experience that sense of deep community again – that sense of being held and accepted by others – and a desire to actively create that community with others. And I don’t want to ‘do this for’ others – I want to be part of it, a peer, a participant. I don’t know where these desires will lead me, but these are the clues I have currently about what the next phase might have in store for me.
My amused, entangled feelings stem from the facts that on Wednesday, I will be starting a part-time role coordinating a community centre, and next week, I will be leading a retreat called ‘Community-making at the end of the world as we know it.’ It seems things are definitely moving through me.
I am incredibly grateful to be part of several, incredibly supportive online communities that actually provide space to process the state of the world right now and how dizzying it feels to be living through these times. We had one of these just this morning – our ‘Systems Curious’ group – in which one of the group members spoke of “the richness of inconveniences.” Typing that phrase has suddenly made me remember the time I was trying to get back to Australia in the middle of the UK winter. Newcastle airport had frozen and planes couldn’t get in or out. My flight was delayed by 24 hours. When I returned to the airport the next day, the news hadn’t changed, but I needed to get home to Australia, so myself and a hearty band of three other folk I had just met in the airport decided to try to get to London overland instead. We took a taxi together into town, caught the next train to London…which then broke down somewhere in the Midlands. We had to wait for another train to come rescue us, but we made it to London in the end, and each caught our international flights. This is the shortest version of this story I’ve ever told but it was really quite an adventure, an experience of a ‘sudden village’ forming, and has given me a great story to share for many years. It was a total inconvenience, but an incredibly rich one.
I contrast this with something another friend shared on social media last week, which was a cartoon of two people. One suggested getting pizza for dinner. The other said, “yes”, and also said, “But let’s go to the pizza shop ourselves and interact with strangers to do so because it’s not good for us being able to get everything we want from the push of a button on a device in our pocket.” Amen to that.
I’ve been feeling this really strongly recently – how our lives have become dominated by ‘convenience’ but at the expense of many valuable things we’re only just starting to notice. My friend, George, summed up this consequence of our current system, describing us as living lives of “‘splendid’ isolation”. I read another article a few months ago called, “Everyone wants a village, but no-one wants to be a villager.” It was arguing that being a villager involves being ‘interrupted’ and ‘requested of’ by other villagers – and that none of us really want that (preferring our splendid isolation). I, and many other people, disagreed with the author. While we might not be used to ‘being a villager’, while we might have forgotten the skills of co-living raised on a diet of convenience, it doesn’t mean that we’re not willing to unlearn our training and forego convenience for the sake of a being part of a village. As the shadow side of everything being convenient is starting to make itself felt, we are slowly beginning to appreciate the richness of ‘inconveniences’.
This is part of where I am – unlearning and thinking about foregoing convenience. (My friend who posted the pizza cartoon and I had a subsequent conversation about the degree to which people are already relying on AI – and the ways in which this is taking us further away from each other.) I am feeling nervous about starting this role at the community centre – I’ve never done it before – but it also feels like a step in a really healthy direction, one of entanglement and the wonderful messiness of people.
Not that I need to explain, but I feel the reason I haven’t written a Letter since January is primarily down to the fact that we had a baby last November. Iris turns 1 in four weeks. I cannot believe it. Having children is definitely one of the richest inconveniences life has to offer - but please don’t tell Rosa (aged 5) that I called her an inconvenience.
She scares me.