440. Communities as Portals to the World
February 23, 2015
My community centered on Bar Harbor has many portals providing access to world culture. I send Christmas cards to California, Australia, and England via the U.S. Post Office. I manage my money at a bank with several branches throughout the region. The local library gives me access to book collections all across Maine. UPS and FedX deliver packages to my door from sources I contact on the Web.
The local movie theater shows films made in many countries. That’s where I saw Ten Canoes, made by Aboriginal People in Australia, an instant hit with me (its message: women are the choosers, not men). I have a Wi-Fi connection in my apartment that connects me to the Internet.
Having felt disconnected from a human community when I lived by myself among eagles, herons, and loons, I now consider myself over-connected to the distractions of the world, and am cutting back on many of the links I have built through the years, trying to find a workable balance that doesn’t erode the peace and quiet I need to think my own thoughts and feel like myself.
Choosing the communities we live in is a serious matter. We weigh our potential engagements very carefully, considering neighborhoods, jobs, schools, and transportation. In the wrong surroundings, we can lose our sense of equanimity very quickly. Which I realized by leaping from one extreme to the other by moving back to the mainland on the 23rd of December, 1988, to stay with Janwillem van de Wetering, the very man, it turned out, I needed to help me restore my sense of balance.
Our minds and lifestyles are highly susceptible to the communities we live in. We have to achieve the right placement to get the balance of our engagements just right—so that we are replenished to the degree we expend ourselves. If we can’t choose our community, then we become creatures of that place and adapt to it.
We need to live to a similar degree in the world and in ourselves at the same time to keep our incoming perceptions in-line with our outgoing activities. If the balance tips excessively either way, our engagements become distorted, taking a toll on our minds. Abstinence is as bad as overindulgence.
Our capacity for judgment is crucial to the regulation of our engagements with our families, communities, cultures, and nature. Moderation is not necessarily the answer. I find that selectivity in choosing the projects I take on is essential to my personal happiness.
Think of the temptations we face on the Web and in the big city. Today, wherever we live, we have access to virtual communities where anything goes—pornography, drugs, and terrorist activity, along with recipes for squash soup and where to buy a used car.
It is up to each of us to tailor the community we live in to our needs. Which takes personal judgment in each case. The body I am may have GPS coordinates in Bar Harbor, but my mind can go anywhere on Earth, hugely extending my community of immediate engagements beyond any conventional limits imposed by my physical location.
Since in this blog I claim that I live wholly in my mind, and it is my mind that travels the Internet, my email address may be more crucial to my identity than my street address ever was. At least in a limited, virtual sense.
The potential disconnect between my physical and mental locations raises the issue of trust as the key to the community that I actually inhabit. Do I trust my virtual neighbors on the Web as I do my physical neighbors in Bar Harbor? A few yes, many no. Face-to-face interactions make all the difference in opening me to facial expressions, gestures, postures, and tones of voice.
The Internet opens me to a host of anonymous others making claims on my attention, judgment, and money. I can buy anything I might want on the Internet, from people I can’t meet and don’t know. What guarantee do I have that these people are who they claim to be, or will deliver as they promise?
The community I choose to live in is based on my engagements with people whom I have reason to trust. If I grow up with such people, and know their children, associates, reputations, and life stories—and they know mine—then we earn a sense of mutual trust as the basis of fruitful engagements.
My grandmother pronounced, after having had tea with a new neighbor, “I didn’t object to her any,” meaning, in her New England way, she had made a new friend because she had found no grounds for suspicion. There was no gap between her standards and her assessment of the lady upon meeting her in person.
If a merchant has a habit of shortchanging me, I take my business elsewhere. If a friend lets me down a lot, I seek him out less often. These are gut-level judgments based on the impressions I form through many engagements with others through the years.
Overall, the ease with which we can engage with people on the Internet today has expanded all of our communities to the extent we are willing to entertain virtual engagements along with those we maintain on the local level face-to-face. There are risks involved, but those who have grown up with the Web seem willing to take them on, and modify their engagements as a matter of course. With the result that they live in a global community far larger than their parents ever did by subscribing to newspapers, magazines, and watching TV.
