community-building?

starting 12:43

one of the main themes that cycle around reduction and peak oil and the return to simpler living is the idea of rebuilding a sense of community where we live. i agree that this is important, but i find myself ill-suited to this endeavor.

the online groups do offer something of a sense of community. at least we do learn that there are others out there (more than 250 on our list now!) who have similar interests and are taking similar actions. i appreciate that, but i wonder how many of us (myself included) are way more comfortable when confronted with words on a screen than with our own neighbors.

our block is pretty neighborly, as they go. there are three or four families with young children (under 10) who all enjoy playing together on summer evenings. jake has been somewhat of an "in" with these families, but that doesn't stop me from being terribly anxious whenever i walk him across the street to his friends' house, or go to call him in for the night. i worry about what these people think of me. i am afraid of their opinions and that they might not like me... plus, what do i say to someone with whom i think the only link we have is our young ones and where we live? what's the "proper" way to socialize with people i barely know but whose children are my child's playmates? there are a lot of unknowns in the potential relationship between myself and these other parents. do they mind if i let my son go play with their kids on their property while i am at home making dinner? i mean, i remember a time when i was young where we all played out on the sidewalks and in different kids' yards and no parents were around at all (they were doing their own grown-up things that we didn't care about, though always available if someone needed an adult). i feel like times have changed, though, and i have this uneasy voice in the back of my head that says that i should be omnipresent wherever jake is, especially if me not being present means that some other adult is "the authority" over wherever he's playing. but then when do i make dinner???

it's hard. being friendly doesn't come naturally to me, at least not beyond saying hello. i think that's probably the core of our issue with not having the kind of community these days that would be supportive of living completely locally; we've lost the skillset that involves acting neighborly and knowing what the "rules" for that would be.