blessed is the spot

As I write this post, I'm sitting on a pillow on the ground. My laptop is perched on one of the many boxes filling our soon to be ex-aparment. Most of our furniture has been dismantled. 

It's a funny thing, to move. At least, that part when all the furniture comes down. Suddenly that space that you knew so intimately, filled with those things that had become background noise in the rooms that had become your own, metamorphoses into another place - one that you barely recognise, even though the floor and walls are still made of the same materials, and the number of square metres hasn't budged. But it suddenly becomes foreign -  it becomes someone else's.  

The big move is tomorrow. We're not going very far - about 200 metres to be exact. To a place big enough to fit all our stuff, and closer to the families whose children will participate in the class and youth group that will take place in the new living room.

After four years of living in this home, in this neighbourhood, what touched me most about us moving on from this place is how it affected some of the youth of this neighbourhood - those that had spent countless hours here. I guess I had begun to take for granted the way the space both reflected and shaped the community that it often housed - the many quotes and prayers decorating our walls, each one attached to a melody known by heart by all these youth, that we'd select from to sing together each time we gathered for a devotional meeting. The coloured papers upon which they were written had too become part of the scenery. As had the messily but adorably coloured in pictures that the children had made in their weekly classes over the years, each image representing a virtue they had learned about, like service or generosity or kindness. Just like the experiences of all these people, these things had simply become a part of this home.

 

A home that, to our great fortune, has come to represent more than just our space, the married couple. When we moved in, we had hoped that it could become a space for service. A space for learning. A space for worship. A space for reflecting and for developing qualities, together, with our community. 

So when some of these youth - who have passed a good part of these four years between these walls in pursuit of these same goals - expressed sadness at the fact that we were moving on from this space, it was heartening. One of them volunteered straight away to organise a final devotional meeting to part ways with the apartment. My husband recounted how another, upon hearing the news, also said she'd really miss the place. He reminded her that she and her family had also moved house recently, and that it wasn't really such a big deal after all. She replied, "It's not the same. We didn't experience the same things in our home that we did here. We didn't have the same memories as we do here."

When he told me this, I felt like these hopes had been realised. The time spent here during these crucial four years of adolescence was a critical part of their development as it was ours. And this space was as much theirs' as it was ours - a genuine place of meeting. Where a sense of place is more than attachment to a room, more than being able to feel your way habitually around the furniture in the dark. But rather a culmination of experiences, where the nature and quality of those experiences determines the strength of this sense of place. Coming to a weekly junior youth group session where you engage in meaningful discussions with friends, plan service projects together and pursue your individual and collective advancement (and also celebrate birthdays, sing together, dance, laugh...) is a very particular experience.

So perhaps then these are some characteristics of these places of meeting? Places where everyone can come together, feel at home, develop together, acquire memories? The four walls bore witness to countless meetings, classes, discussions, prayers and acts of service (sometimes simultaneously). Often people would come over just to do their homework, to talk, to say hello. It wasn't so unusual to hear an unexpected knock at the door - or when the door downstairs was locked (as it often was), to hear a young, shrill voice shouting up from the footpath below, calling us to open up.

As one of the junior youth commented, this apartment is so blessed.

The four walls might look different now as the furniture lies sprawled in pieces all over the floor. But whatever lived between these four walls lives on inside of us - just like we live in places they also live in us. As the keys to physical locations pass from hand to hand, the moments spent within them endure. The bonds that were formed and deepened in this place will carry over into the next one. 

And so we will move tomorrow knowing that we're not going very far, nor really leaving anything behind. Rather we are continuing, as we go on to the next place of meeting. 

One of the youth has already told us that he wants to organise the first devotional meeting in the new apartment. He said he already knew what the first text would be. It starts, "Blessed is the spot..."

"Blessed is the spot,

and the house,

and the place...

...where mention of God hath been made

and His praise glorified."

if life chances weren't dictated by the accident of birth

I loved this little video outlining the vision of economist Jayati Ghosh. As part of a series called 'After Capitlism' in The Guardian video section, the film is titled 'It is irrational to be obsessed with GDP,' but really goes much beyond that. Ghosh's ideal society is one where one's "life chances are not dictated by the accident of birth".

When I started this blog, one of the things on my mind was how mindsets and social strata divide society conceptually and in terms of the opportunities available to us, acting as a barrier to the realisation of genuine places of meeting in society, where people of diverse backgrounds could meet: physically, socially, conceptually.

Ghosh's seven 'dreams' for realising the ideal society outline governance arrangements for how we might organise our economies and societies, and according to what principles. 

But I'll stop there. Do watch the video. It's short and sweet. And offers some great ideas for what a more balanced economy organised around the goals of society might look like, and how government and the participation of the masses might fit into it all. 

What I really loved is the simplicity with which all these things are described. Ghosh makes it all sound so scarily simple. Scary because perhaps the key thing missing from the creation of a society without divisions, from a common meeting space for all of humanity, from equal opportunity, is the willpower to make it happen, and united actions to achieve it. 

we make homes, homes make us

After coming across an extract from the book 'Why We Build' by architecture critic Rowan Moore, published in The Guardian, I started to think a little differently about the notion of 'home' as the place where the family unit, and the individuals within it, are nurtured.

The concept of 'home' is all pervasive. It's that place we all wake up to, and close our eyes to at night. It is the preoccupation of many artists, and as such the subject of countless songs, poems and novels. It is, simply, that place we know most intimately. And yet it is a concept that is also becoming more and more detached: as a glossy image strewn across the inside of IKEA catalogues; as the subject of DIY television shows, causing in turn home renovations to become a disproportionate focus of human activity;  as the collateral that defines the commercial relationship between a bank and its client. From this perspective, we could say that the concept of the home is even in crisis, particularly as it becomes synonymous with the idea of 'home ownership,' an increasingly out of reach dream for more and more people. Perhaps we need to re-contextualise the home as that space that members of a family inhabit, to prepare for the larger realms of community and society. In the extract, Moore speaks explicitly of the connection between home and family, discussing different examples and modes of dwelling. In doing so, he considers how our homes shape our lives, and how we in turn shape our homes.

At the heart of this enduring syndrome is the double meaning of the word 'home'. It means physical residence, but also the family that inhabits it. It means building, people and relationship. 

Building, people and relationship, all tied up into one word: 'home.'

Indeed, at the heart of Moore's vision is a connection between the physical space that a family inhabits and the relationship between that family's members. He asks, does a home make a family, or does a family make a home?

I guess this question begs further questions. Like, why do we put so much effort into embellishing our physical surroundings, into designing spaces that reflect the domestic life that we aspire towards? How do these physical environments affect the relationships taking place within them? Can we make a home anywhere, provided the love between members of a family is based on the right foundations?

Moore addresses all these questions, albeit from a number of angles. On the one hand, he examines what happens when we place too much confidence in the influence of our built environment, whereby housing projects become ends in themselves and misguided attempts to fix what, in many cases, has sadly become the broken project of the family.

It is easy to imagine that, by fixing bricks and mortar, one is also fixing the flesh and blood, the more so as buildings seem easier to sort out than people. The results are more tangible, measurable, demonstrable. Because they are expensive and effortful, construction projects offer the appearance of serious attempts to fix something, even if they are irrelevant to the matter in hand.

In this respect, the home as a physical building can be the most ironic of metaphors. Sturdy buildings provide a strong and solid structure, protecting its residents from wind, hail, and storm. And we are getting better and better at constructing buildings monstrous in scope, inconceivable to past eras: sky-scrapers towering stories and stories higher above the earth, cutting edge architectural feats that will last generations. The irony comes in once we consider what is being lost alongside this growing architectural capacity. Somehow, strangely, as we get better at constructing buildings, at renovating and redecorating our homes, we are becoming less and less capable of laying the solid foundations that hold families together. Of maintaining marriages that last just one lifetime. The abandoned homes in the wake of the financial crisis stand as stark emblems for the social fabric that is being torn apart at its seams as the institution of the family comes crumbling down.

Moore goes on to examine another approach to home-making that I found rather interesting, and which he portrays as a sort of 'nomadic' lifestyle. Describing those who lead such lifestyles, he writes:

All show an ability to construct space out of the tracks they follow and the landmarks, whether a shop window or a sand dune, that they see. They do not need a house to make a home.

This approach challenges traditional notions of 'home', and assumes that we can make a home wherever we go. I suppose if the foundations of a family are strong, then this is especially true. Moore illustrates this idea through the story of the Bijlmer housing development in Amsterdam, which went dramatically off-course from the vision originally conceived by planners, in the process giving birth to its own type of dwelling, its own type of community, who used the space in its own way.

The point of the Biljmer story is partly how an obsessively planned development could be thrown off course by the unexpected...The population of the Bijlmer had to discover, in a few decades, how to inhabit a place through adaptations, actions, successes and mistakes...the residents of the Bijlmer make their universes around and in spite of the fabric. 

After reading this, I couldn't help but feel that it's rather the same with life in general. No matter how good we might be at planning, no matter how much time and consultation we might devote to meticulously designing each step of our lives, if such plans are not flexible, if they cannot be adapted, then they'll never work. The unexpected arrives at any moment, and in this flux usually throws our so-called plans completely off course. From experience, its the ability to recognise these 'accidents' as opportunities, rather than as obstacles, that helps plans to metamorphose into something much better than that which we could have ever dreamt up. Indeed, for the most part, life choices are reactions to a series of unexpected detours, that somehow get you closer to where you wanted to be than if you had tried to map the journey out yourself - on the condition that you have a clear sense of purpose. So, perhaps being a 'nomad' can also mean, quite simply, being open to living your life according to how you feel you can best serve humanity, at that moment, and following and settling wherever the divine winds take you to do so. That may not necessarily mean traversing the Earth; sometimes the unexpected plan is to stay right where you are. In that sense, its being nomadic in spirit rather than in movement.

This also changes the conception of the home as static, as something we build around us, to home as something that comes from within us - an outward expression of the relationships in our lives.

In this same vein, human geographer Fi-Yu Tuan sees a direct link between the notion of home or dwelling and our relationships with other people. In his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Tuan describes how the value of home as a place stems directly from the intimacy experienced there, as a result of human bonds, and how the concept of home can simply mean being with our loved ones. From a similar perspective, 'home' may not only be a union with other people, but to many, signifies the notion of closeness to God, as an expression of the longing of the soul to know its Creator. A writing from the Baha'i Faith describes this notion of home in the following way:

O Son of Being! Thy Paradise is My love; thy heavenly home, reunion with Me. Enter therein and tarry not. This is that which hath been destined for thee in Our kingdom above and Our exalted dominion.

Home in this context goes well beyond a physical space; it is more of a state, and a spiritual state at that, which then becomes manifested in our physical state and expressed in the environment around us. Building on this notion of home as a manifestation of those things held within and between us, it is interesting to consider Moore's view:

We want buildings to embellish, beautify, dignify, distract or divert. We want them to propose and to enable: to suggest what could be, to make things possible, to give freedoms. The idea of home, whether expressed as a stable cosmos or as nomadic wandering, shows a basic truth, which is that the space we occupy is not neutral to us. We cannot look at it with detachment. We are in it, we make it and it makes us.

In this passage, Moore also describes the mutuality of the interaction between space and us: it is not, as originally premised, a binary question of whether homes makes us or whether we make home. It is rather one fluid movement whereby we are shaped by the environments that we in turn shape. This concept is explored in more depth in the following passage from the writings of the Baha'i Faith:

We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions. 

That our built environment influences us is hardly a new concept. But how does this premise operate in the context of the physical space of our homes? Perhaps one way is that our conception of home and what we see ourselves as doing there influences how we arrange it, which in turn influences the habits formed around a family's interactions and exchanges. We could ask whether the setting we create within our home is a space to welcome our neighbours and communities, or whether these spaces promote learning and discussion. Such reflection might also include questions like where the television is situated in the 'family' room, and what assumptions this promotes about the nature and quality of the relationships between a family's members. All these things would influence the progress of the family, as a unit, and that of the individuals within it. As Moore notes:

If it is a mistake to think that a house can mend a family, the opposite is also false. That is, the built background to our lives is not irrelevant, either. To put the case negatively, the wrong kinds of buildings can inflict misery and frustration. 

Perhaps we also need to reflect on the extent to which such choices are always conscious ones, or how much they reflect, for example, the values sprawled between the pages of those furniture catalogues. In a world full of conflicting views, of fading ideals, from where do we draw our examples of home and family life?