So, England is Weird
I know, I know.
England is only weird to me because my reference point is home (otherwise known as not England). But still, England is weird.
Everything here is so, cultivated. No, that's not it. Manufactured? Artificial. Deliberate. Conscious. Ordinarily, intentionality is not a bad thing. Often, that's the difference between success and failure. But intentionality also highlights the things that are missing. For example, when you become aware that your partner isn't feeling assured, you show them how much they mean to you. When you become aware that your knees are crackling like an open fire while you squat, you introduce mobility and strengthening exercises into your routine. Likewise, when you become aware that people are lonely, alienated and disconnected, you create spaces that foster that connection across the entire community. And, in so doing, you realise how little the concept of community figured in your life.
By community, I suppose I mean people coming together to enrich each other and themselves. Often, it is unconscious. At home, community is everywhere - for better or worse. It's not something that needs to be slotted in and catered to, it just is everywhere. It is not a vessel we use to cross the ocean that is life, it is the ocean. This isn't to say that everyone is working together well or is, necessarily, concerned with helping others. But, rather, there is this keen awareness of what we owe to each other at all times. These obligations are not static and fixed, but fluid and responsive. They can be overwhelming and suffocating. But they can also be reassuring and supportive.
Yet, in England, I don't feel obliged to remember what I owe my neighbours and myself; at least in the grand sense of the word. There's something about living here that makes community feel optional. Something that encourages me to separate my best interests from those of the community, as if what is good for us, might not be good for me. Something that makes doing something collaborative, feel concessional and sacrificial.
This could be because I am a new person, in a new environment, doing something new. These layers of unfamiliarity could have blended together; overwhelming me; encouraging me to hide while I regain my sense of direction. Similarly, they could have calcified into insecurity, which makes building community kind of hard. Still, building community - perhaps the one thing that could orient me - feels like more work than I'm used to. It feels like I'm doing the centre splits, while someone pulls me forward. Or like trying to find formfitting, comfortable jeans that fit across your waist and hips. Or like learning a new language. and the harder it gets - opportunities for finding community set aside - community starts to feel obligatory rather than necessary. It's also entirely possible that I'm not trying hard enough and as I experience lower returns, I put in less effort and so on and so forth. Yet, I can't help feeling as if the ocean has changed. Like I finally figured out how to trust the waves, only to be tossed into a boat, determined to master these waves.
And I'm right.
The ocean has changed. And England is weird (like a dog with a bone, I'll be about this point lol).
At home, community was easy because I could afford to do it. I haven't quite parsed this out yet; but what I mean is that my life was privileged enough to spare me some of the anxieties that isolate me from my desire to connect with and to my community. I could afford to take time. I could take time building friendships and relationships that benefited my overall well-being, not merely my socio-economic status. I could take the time the heal and intentionally pursue growth. Crucially, I could take the time to learn how to like myself. I had time to do nothing.
And now, I don't; at least not as much as I did. And I can feel it.
Creating the space for community is difficult when you want to recover after a long day and cannot be arsed to maintain the performance. Creating the time for community is difficult when you're not sure if you'll be granted the space to just exist and to unburden yourself of the expectations of the outside (even if these are expectations you place on yourself, that only become activated in most peoples' presence). And so community becomes a choice - an option whose absence is felt in the presence of designated spaces designed to foster it.*
Or, to quote Joni Mitchell and later Kelly Rowland,
"don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got, until it's gone"
And that's what makes England kinda weird, if weird can be reduced to feelings of unfamiliarity. Building that community is harder than I thought it would be; at least this time around.
Here, community feels like an achievement - like mastery over the waves. It feels like a prize, and not something I was always guaranteed; something inalienable. Community feels like work; intentional work. And that's weird.
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