Tag Archives: community

Alone Again!

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Have you ever found yourself absolutely alone in a crowded room—at a family gathering, perhaps, or a business function, a party with friends, a community meeting?  It would seem hard to accomplish that when one is surrounded by so many people, but I manage it all the time.

At a recent Mothers Day gathering with my two daughters, their husbands, my five grandchildren, two of their boyfriends, and my wife all in attendance, conversations were animated, exuberant, and loud.  I know, because there I was, perched on a stool around the large island in the middle of the kitchen (always our family’s favourite gathering place), surrounded by this multitude, yet strangely not involved in any of the conversations.  Nursing a glass of wine, I found myself eavesdropping on each different group in turn, quite interested in the latest news they all were sharing with one another about their work and school activities, yet not contributing a word myself.

But this is not a new phenomenon.  In fact, having become almost invisible on so many such occasions, I’m rarely even asked to contribute.

Over the years, I’ve often wondered if I’m naturally introverted, or maybe anti-social by nature.  From time to time, I’ve questioned my conversational skills or lack thereof.  I’ve even fallen prey every now and then to doubting my innate charm and charisma, and I’ve worried that perhaps no one holds me in high esteem.

Too many times, it seems, I’m at a restaurant with three or four couples, and I look up from my soup to find myself alone at our table.  I wonder if the others might be at the salad bar or in the washroom, perhaps—but all of them?  At the same time?

Or I might be at a dance, ten of us sharing a table, and I suddenly realize I’m sitting by myself again, while the others are up dancing or table-hopping.

The tedious jokes flow at these moments, naturally.  Seeing me alone, someone will ask in a loud voice if I’m dining tonight with all my friends.  Or someone will wonder if I said something to offend everyone in my party.

The problem is, I’ve never had an answer.

What I do know, however, is that I’m not one to blithely accept blame for my own perceived shortcomings.  I am a loving and capable person, after all—or so I want to believe—and I have choices.  For example, if people are ignoring me—or worse, don’t even realize I’m present—I can choose to consider it a flaw on their part, not mine.  The problem with that approach, however, is that many of them are people I love and admire, so it’s difficult to malign them, even secretly.

A better choice, I’ve discovered, is to adopt the stance that I am freely choosing to be alone in these various situations.  I’m doing it on purpose.  And why?  Well, because I’m a writer of fiction, and it’s a well-established fact that, to be effective, writers like me, who make stuff up, have to be keen observers of human nature.  After all, if we’re going to create believable characters out of whole cloth in our stories, we absolutely must possess a keen sense of what makes people tick in real life.  And the best way to do that, I’ve convinced myself, is by observing those around me, listening to them, getting a feel for them through what they do and what they say.

Interacting with people, I believe, is not good because I will inevitably corrupt the essence of who they are through my own conversational filters.  But by choosing to stand back, remaining aloof, I am better able to ascertain who they really are in their daily interactions.  They remain unblemished by any preconceived notions I might apply to them, and it is those untarnished attributes I will then bring to the creation of my own fictional characters, thereby improving the quality of my writing.

Or so I tell myself.

Nevertheless, I confess to a lingering and puzzling disappointment whenever I find myself alone again in large groups.  Recently, on the advice of someone I trust, I arranged to see a therapist renowned for helping folks like me.  My first appointment was yesterday, but to my surprise, it was a group-session—not something I had counted on.  After fetching the obligatory coffee, I took a seat in the circle and listened as each person in turn explained why he or she was there, what their last week had been like, how the others in their lives continued to let them down…and so forth and so on.  I found it fascinating, and was soon busy tapping notes surreptitiously into my phone.  I wasn’t sure that was allowed, but happily, no one seemed to notice what I was doing.

After an hour or so, I was fully-engrossed in reading over these notes, optimistic that I’d uncovered a gold-mine of observations I could use back at my writing-desk.  I looked up, eager to listen to whoever was next, and…well, you can probably imagine my shock when I discovered I was alone in the room.  The session had ended, the circle was broken, and no one had asked to hear from me.

Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, I chose the former.  These therapy sessions, I told myself, were going to prove a treasure-trove of inspiration for my writing.  And best of all, I was going to be able to gather whatever information I wanted with no one even knowing.  As in so many other instances, I was virtually invisible in the group.

No wonder I’m such a good writer!

Alone again! 

The Sandbox

Over a period of years a long time ago, on my daily walks to and from work through a local community park, I used to watch groups of pre-schoolers playing in a very large sandbox.  I was always struck by their singular focus on the primitive sculptures and projects they were building.  Oblivious to events going on around them in the park, they directed all their energy towards the activities in the sandbox.

A few of the kids looked to be cooperating with each other, working diligently in pursuit of whatever objective they had settled on.  Their interactions were punctuated by short bursts of conversation, lots of smiles, and the occasional whoop of glee when something came to fruition.

Most of the others in the group played alone, apparently unconcerned with the endeavours of their companions—typical of that age and stage of development.  Quick flares of temper occasionally gushed forth, and angry exchanges, when one person’s endeavours somehow impinged upon another’s, but on the whole, the mass of children in the sandbox managed to coexist.

Their mothers—no fathers, alas—watched with a mix of pride and bemusement as their offspring played, secure and happy in the park.

As time passed, those children got older and left the sandbox, but they were replaced by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of similar youngsters, and the pattern remained the same.  And everyone in the sandbox was concerned only with what was happening within its confines, no one with the goings-on in the rest of the park.

I noticed changes in the park at large, however.  In the early years, it had been a sylvan haven for children and families—a place to gather with friends, to cool off under the trees on mid-summer weekends, to escape the pressures of the daily grind.  As time passed, though, I began to miss the family gatherings, as many of those parents, some of them working two jobs, were no longer able to come.  And at the same time, more and more older children began to frequent the area, not playing the sorts of games I was familiar with from my own childhood, but just hanging out.  Loud music could often be heard, smoke hung over many of the conclaves, and occasional fist-fights would erupt between different groups.  In time, the park became, not so much a family destination, as a place for the neighbourhood’s teenage kingpins to gather.

The children in the sandbox were affected by these changes, of course.  Now, they had to avoid issues with the older kids if they hoped to play their games.  But, for the most part, they were able to do that, and in their exuberance and innocence, they continued their childish pursuits, interacting with one another as their predecessors always had.  None of them cared that the de facto ownership of the park had been co-opted.

To be sure, it never became a dangerous place, one to be avoided.  I continued my daily walks with no fear, but I was aware of the changed dynamic, even if the sandbox urchins were not.

Today, long-since retired and no longer walking in that park, I think of it as an allegory of sorts to the present situation with our government.  When I watch Question Period, for example, whether federal or provincial, the elected denizens of Parliament focus so much of their energies and time on what seems to me nothing more than spurious activities, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, as Shakespeare wrote.  As I watch and listen, I see again those pre-schoolers in their sandbox, engrossed in the small world they are occupying.

To be sure, legislation does get passed, much of it to the benefit of the country or province as a whole, even if never fully satisfying everybody.  And that’s good.  But I find it akin to the completion of those sandbox projects and sculptures that so pleased their creators—not insignificant, beneficial to their future growth and development, but accomplished only with such fuss and foofaraw as to be laughable.

A more serious situation, however, has developed outside the sandbox—the Parliament—in terms of who is really in control.  While elected officials busy themselves with their daily perambulations, much as those pre-schoolers did, private-sector interests are busy trying to take over the park, so to speak.  Be it wealthy, corporate entities, land-developers and real-estate companies, foreign-based media ownership, legal, banking, and financial firms, or myriad other lobbyist organizations, the environment around Parliament has undergone a radical change.

The ownership and culture of a local park are things to be gained or lost by the residents of the community in which it sits, according to their wishes and level of activism.  Depending upon how a community responds, their sandbox may be lost.

But the ownership and culture of our provincial and federal Parliaments are embedded in our constitutional rights—they belong to us, the citizens of this country.  Do we want to lose them?  Have we entrusted them to the finest possible stewards, our best and brightest?  Is there a fix for the encroaching, pernicious influence of the big-moneyed interests? What are we to make of foreign influence on our government?

More of us need to pay more attention to these questions, or all of us may end up losing our sandbox altogether.