A Withering Tree

There is a conversation that I have been having with myself for the last few weeks. It is always lurking in the recesses of my brain mostly suppressed unless I am by myself driving, or in the early hours of the morning before everyone wakes up in the house and I am staring out the window watching the sun rise with my cup of tea. It has been bubbling to the surface during these solitary, contemplative moments and is now over taking my otherwise busy time. So much that I am unable to focus on other things now, and I feel I will never get anything done until I either write something down somewhere, or have a nice long conversation or discussion about it with someone who will get it, or take some action to do something about it.

Unfortunately there is no one to speak to who will get it and I am not sure I will be able to articulate myself well in spoken word anyway. It needs to be written down and put out here, where it will stay in Internet limbo for strangers to stumble upon and I will take comfort in the fact that I may have shared it with someone with whom my thoughts resonate. Perhaps I will be able to then move on and get things done around this house!

I have been lamenting the hopeless lack of community.

 I feel like we are in the middle of a crisis.

We are always throwing that word around. Muslim community, homeschooling community, autism community, Pakistani community and so on. Does anyone even understand the meaning of the word? From where I am standing there is no community of any sort. There are networks and committees. There is a Muslim network, a homeschooling network, an autism network, a facebook network and so on. In this network people associate with others in a transient manner, based only on shared interests. If tomorrow I was to walk away from all these things, I wonder if I would even feel the need to stay connected to any of these individuals. What does that say about the strength or meaning behind any of these connections?

Much like the school friends, university friends and so on, they too will be lost in time.

Where are the loving aunts and uncles who see you regularly and talk to you about life and their own youth? Where are the grand mothers who held secrets of another era and would pass some of those on to you? Is it just me and my family that is suffering this sad state of disassociation? Or is everyone so well insulated and compartmentalized that the pathetic transient encounters and empty professions of friendship and so called community are now viewed as the best that we are ever going to get.

Am I letting my fantasy world of real human connections and meaningful relationships get in the way of the reality of my near anonymous existence in all these networks and pseudo communities? Perhaps I should accept this as a sign of the end of times and keep on trucking the best I can with what is out here and hope for the best for myself and my children?

You see, many years ago I had a taste of a real community.  This community consisted of people of various ages from the elderly to the very young. They did not meet monthly or weekly but their interactions were intricately woven in a beautiful symphony of daily encounters. This community was made up of aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours, neighbours’ relatives and so on.

Then we migrated to another country and it was all over.

From there started full time schooling and transient associations with strangers.

Pursuit of a “better life” kept my father out of the house most of the time, kept me and my siblings in a secular school for most of the day. After school there was television and dinner and so went the next twelve years of my life until university where pretty much the same thing continued.

Those who never had a taste of community probably do not even realize what they are missing. “Better” schools, more expensive private tutoring, expensive extra-curricular activities, technology and more ephemeral connections fill the void until that is the norm.

But I had it and I long for it, for myself and for my kids. I know what it’s like and I know what the lack of it can do to a person.

My kids do not have those loving aunts and uncles who will take time to teach them to ride a bike and take them for walks. I will most likely have to buy such a person, hire a therapist or apply for the services of a community volunteer.

There are no elderly. They have been either left behind in “back home” nations or segregated from the young. They no longer serve the purpose they served in the old days of child rearing and family life.

Most of today's grandparents are glued to TV screens themselves, plagued by their own mental health problems, watching the news or day time television.  They have no skills or secrets to pass on to the young kids, only complaints of a life filled with physical, financial and emotional difficulty. Television, immigration, delegating child rearing to schools and strangers and a lack of community robbed them of their purpose too.

If there are a lucky few families on this earth where grandparents read books, have special skills, have religious knowledge and other wisdom to impart to their grandchildren, then when in the week are they getting to spend time with the young to transmit this knowledge?

As a child my own grandmother was always in another country. By the time we had access to her in our university days she was a withered old woman addicted to various medication after years of a lonely existence, unable to give any aspect of her lost secrets to us. I heard she used to knit, crochet, sow and was a fierce single mother. I never knew that woman unfortunately, except for a few short weeks of summer holiday trips to the home country.

Today I am a fragment of a poor legacy of institutionalization and lack of community. I am alone in my day to day affairs. My kids do not spend daily time with members of family. There are no elderly. There are no wise adolescents with whom they can develop binding ties who can mentor them.  I meet people I know by name in monthly “xyz group” meetings or run in to them here and there, but only when there is a shared interest. When these individuals (or me) have no shared interest, we are content to ignore each other for weeks oblivious of the state of the other. This is not a community. This is a pathology.

What is the antidote?

People talk of escaping, perhaps moving to Muslim lands for a more religious education. Another  foreign place, more strangers. They talk about homeschooling and moving out to the country side and living on farms.

In my conversations with my mother or relatives who are still “back home” I hear stories of a world that I no longer recognize from my childhood. My mother complains of gun fire and constant power cuts, depression and regret. My friends talk only of money and how to acquire more of it. My relatives lament the departure of more relatives to other nations via immigration. 

I fantasize sometimes of returning but I know what I want to return to no longer exists.

The plague of fragmentation leaves no one untouched.

Surely this cannot be just my dilemma. Are you out there? What are you doing about it? Should I just give up, stop fantasizing and accept this reality and hope for the best?

I want something better for my children. I want a real community.