3.3 Community and Gifts: Sharing and Receiving.

Susan Tibaldi Parkette. 

When we went through a period of lock-outs recently it seemed like a uniquely dark time. We were not able to gather in our gathering places: schools, cafes, churches, including the ‘office.’ The ‘office’ is a good case study on the absence of joy or anticipation regarding the ability to return to a place of camaraderie and fellowship; togetherness with our colleagues. (Or perhaps this camaraderie was originally lacking.)

Emerging from the shadows puts us into a blinding light. It also shatters the quiet and solitude we discovered there. A great number of our relationships can be shifted to become transactional relationships, and so they have. In some ways, we may have reached saturation, a personal state, whereby we need to keep people out of our lives, or at the very least, reduce their intrusions. 

Further, we live in a new era of Artificial Intelligence wherein we fear robots becoming human. This fear obscures the fact that humans are quietly becoming robots, programmed to run a series of instructions, but little more. This is most prevalent in the exchange of goods and services in the marketplace. 

But where I live I cannot deny my connection to community. We are connected by our water supply, our gas, our electricity, our streetlights, our roadways, and we share the same policing and fire departments. I am a participant in the common good by virtue of these forgotten technologies. Ultimately, these technologies might free me up to become more human in my interactions within living community. I might become free to use my gifts. 

Our gifts are not something we own, they only become gifts when they are given. And when they are received. Of course, gifts can be transmitted digitally, or by letter, art, or song. But perhaps we tend to think of the gifts we have as complete when they are only partial. In truth, we need the alchemy of many gifts to ignite our own contribution, a kind of synergy that does not exist in solitude. The airplane will not fly until all of the parts are brought to the assembly. 

Not everyone will agree on this, I am not seeking agreement, but rather personal change and growth; a coming out of the wilderness and away from the narrative of reality as a social construct, an outcome of the zeitgeist. 

When I had an abdominal hernia surgery years ago, I had the unique experience of the process of recovery. When I could walk, I had to walk slowly and gently. In doing so I was magically transformed into this hidden world. It was the invisible world of the slow people. Those, who through infirmity, were unable to become visible in the fast world. The fast world moved around them, unseeing. Periodically we notice the slow world and make them recipients of our ‘gifts.’ Seldom do we acknowledge that those in the slow world exist and that we in the fast world live in an incomplete, if not tragic world, devoid of receiving their gifts.