Something More Than Just 'Me'

Our next-door neighbours are moving. There is a ‘Sold’ sign in the corner of the

garden. It just appeared there one day, ‘For Sale’ then ‘Sold’. It’s not like I ever got to know them very well, but I feel responsible somehow. It probably has nothing to do with me at all – as if I am at the centre of their world! It will be catchment areas for schools or something. We are not in the worst area of town, but there are better places, maybe.

I am not a neighbour from hell. I don’t play music so loud that the walls shake. I don’t plunge knitting needles into balls that bounce over the wall into my garden.

I am not a sociable person for much of the time. People unsettle me. I remember with the previous owners, I plucked up the courage to visit them. I bought a packet of biscuits and pressed the doorbell. There wasn’t a cell in my body that did not want to retreat, but I stood there waiting. They weren’t in, so I went home, made a pot of tea and ate my way through the packet.

I possibly have nothing in common with my neighbours, but I don’t know them, so I don’t know. We used to have a delivery of vegetables from a local farm, complete with eggs and butter. They have been on the receiving end of our surplus, but it has not led to any conversations or banter over the garden wall.

I am thinking about the next people that move in and whether I can do better. And whether I want to do better. I like my quiet life.

Looking back over all the different houses, streets and numbers I have inhabited, I can’t think of anywhere I have lived and known the people next door or across the road, or in the case of a flat, the people living beneath me, or above me.

It’s not all my fault. In ‘Neighbours’ or in ‘Home and Away’ there are the people on the doorstep with the casserole the day someone moves in. I have never had that casserole moment. And perhaps I am poorer for it. I have never been the one to deliver the casserole. Mostly it is down to not knowing I have a new neighbour in the first place. I am not the most observant of people and I have no net curtains to twitch.

I am very self-contained. If everyone was like me there would be no neighbourliness at all. I say I am happy with my own company, but I’m not really designed to be a hermit. Without encounters with other people, without their conversations, without their views being expressed I think I would live a very monochrome life. People add a vibrancy to my life that I cannot mix up with my limited selection of colours.

A friend and I were talking the other day. He is not a sociable person either. I

have had a lifetime teaching in busy secondary schools and, to some extent, I have earned my quiet space. It is not the same for him. There are skills that can only be learned in the context of community – communication, empathy, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution and negotiation. You can’t develop the skill of good listening if you are not with people. You can’t see things from someone else’s perspective if you don’t mix with others.

In my natural state I would confess that my interpersonal skills are lacking, but I rarely allow myself to live in my natural state. I know my own inclinations toward a hermit existence, but I choose not to live there. Since retiring, I have less interaction with young people. I have entered the world of the ‘mature’ generation. It is a slower pace of life. But even then, the whole joining of clubs sometimes requires to be kick-started. Reasons flood the brain as to why I should not do this or that and sometimes I listen to them and lie down in surrender. Other times I pull up my socks, lace up my shoes and step forward.

We need each other.

Friendship

friendship begins when

I know myself alone and

I cannot keep breathing if

no one knows my name

my face and frame or

the thoughts I think or

the things I hold dear

a birth certificate with fading words

on folded yellow paper

records time, place and parent

nothing to tell of

the candles on my birthday cakes

my love for James

or the tears I shed when he moved away

you know those things – my memories shared

you know I exist

because I reached out and

entrusted you with “me”

and in the touching and embracing of you

and him and her and they

I became something more than just “me”