The Importance of Community - and where we find it.

Over the last seven months, a lot of ink has been spilled in discussions of community, and of what our current isolation has done to our sense of it. We can't come together in great groups of bodies to watch a play, or a sports match, or run a church fete... but I wonder if this isn't just one more of those subjects that a crisis has shone a spotlight on, and where the standards and expectations we refer to are those of a different time.

When people talk about community, they often mean the local community, the people we live near. But how many of us can say that our local community was strong in 2019, 2018, 2017? The high street and its demise has been a cause for concern and clickbait headlines since before clickbait was a word, and community in urban settings has always been fractured, because people are different, and turn to different things when they have the opportunity to. The key for the future of our physical communities is keeping enough in place, and enough support there, to maintain connections, and to encourage people to participate.

I've lived where I do for 12 years now, and I have, gradually, built ties to the community - I've been to the gym and to exercise classes in a close-knit group of people; I've worked in a number of the shops on that high street, and shopped in more; I sing in the church up the road; I went to the breastfeeding support group at the community centre.

Almost none of those communities have disappeared this year. My exercise classes moved online, and the chat stayed on my phone; the shops are still there, offering amazing service through click and collect or home delivery; the choir rehearsals started with reduced numbers in very strict conditions and then moved to Zoom; my knit-group went to the park, and then virtual. The Christmas fete is being held over the phone with a printed catalogue and a whole host of activities! Yes, it may have taken a bit of inventiveness, but does it bring us together? Absolutely.

In some ways, I feel more connected to my locality, because I'm here all the time! I'm not travelling 10 miles to a city every day to work, and only seeing my house in the dark. Instead, I sit in my 'home office', and I watch from my window as the neighbours go for walks, the delivery services appear, the recycling van passes through... I've seen more of my neighbours in lockdown than I did before. I'm able to shop locally because I am here, and I can arrange to collect printing from a local print shop in my lunch break safely.

The communities I miss are those I used to travel for - my family, of course, and my knitting (and other) friends. I would usually go to three knitting festivals over the course of the year, and I have missed seeing the familiar faces, meeting the friends I only see in person at those events, and fleshing out those conversations that can't be had in full in a social media thread.

Tonight I've been to a wonderful event, and it sounds like it might be the first of a series - Karie Westermann In Conversation With Esther Rutter, discussing knitting in the landscape and how our countryside has been created by wool. After a busy day at work, and a rush to and from nursery, that hour of talking seriously about something that matters to me, in the company of a whole host of amazing knitters was such a boon. I feel like I've reconnected with the friends I've been missing from festivals, even though we couldn't talk to each other.

This has really brought home to me how much our knitting community matters to me - how much I'm missing in-person events, and how much connecting through virtual media can help with that. There are new podcasts out from Pins and Needles and Caithness Craft Collective, and I'm looking forward to sitting down with these friends, even if we have a time lag, and they can't hear me agreeing with them! Community is a construct of people coming together, and we need those ties to support each other in easy and difficult times. If necessity is the mother of invention, then let's use the stimulus of 2020 to keep those connections going, to recognise when we're losing touch, and to rebuild our links to each other.

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