Well here we are, fellow Rotarians. At home. No real time meetings. No Sergeant’s Sessions. No President’s wise words. No Jill. No Kirstin. And no Larry!
So how are we doing? What are we doing?
For me, these are days of real and present danger. Joy keeps thinking up jobs. Lots of them. I didn’t realise a house and garden could be so full of jobs. Mow the lawn. Dust the furniture. Re-organise the bookcases. Put away junk. Vacuum the house. And that’s the whole house. The whole …. house.
There are, of course, less strenuous and emotionally confronting ways to fill in the days.
Shaving, for example. I realise this is a gender-specific activity, but nail painting might fall into the same general category. Cleaning out the bathroom cupboard I discovered my Old Dad’s Old Shaving Kit. From the days when men were men. Here was the full-blown safety razor, razor strap for sharpening the blades, and wooden bowl with hairy brush still with soap ready to be swirled up into a lather. If you do it properly, shaving can use up around 30 minutes. Time well spent. Applying band-aids adds another ten.
Of course, you can always do exercises, but try to avoid them as they require you to adopt unseemly positions. They also fug up your bedroom with an aroma unbecoming to delicate nostrils. And put aside any temptation to get in physical exercise equipment. All that metal. People could get the wrong idea.
And then there are the more civilised pursuits. Books. CDs of the classical composers. None of that Funk Rock rubbish with only three chords. Listen to that for more than sixty seconds and you’ll go mad.
How about learning a language? I mean a foreign language, Larry. Like Latin. Get to grips with those pesky little gerunds. And the pluperfect. Pure joy.
Still, these troublous days remind us how easy it is for us to become isolated, and to have little or no contact with anybody else.
There was a first-century writer once, called Paul, and he said that to be fully human, you had to be part of a body – a group or a community - something larger than yourself. And he used the example of the human body. There can be no body, he said, unless there’s more than one member. If all we had was a foot, it wouldn’t be a body. Or if we only had a hand, it wouldn’t be a body.
I don’t know how many bits we need to make a body, but it would useful to have a head, a trunk, a few arms and legs, and some blood pumped around by a heart.
You’ve got to have more than one bit to make a body. Unless you’re a jellyfish, I suppose, or something like that. The point is that more than one is needed.
Just as it needs more than one person to get to the truth of the matter, to get the balance right, to apply other perspectives, and to provide the opportunity for us to come to a more thorough understanding of ourselves. Being alone isn’t the way.
A few years ago when I was looking through a schedule of conferences to be held in Oxford over the summer, and I saw listed a Conference for Hermits. At first I thought this was pretty much against the spirit of the thing, but then, on reflection, it rings true. Our life is meant to be corporate, not individual. We need the corporate aspect of life in community to become fully human. Loneliness has been described as the greatest misfortune of all.
The French-Catholic existentialist, Gabriel Marcel, who lived in the first part of the 20th century, once said that the reality of our personal existence can be fulfilled only as we engage with communal life. Outside a community, he said, we can become obsessed with our personal, private needs and ambitions in an introverted, self-indulgent way. It’s only within the mutual interaction of a community, he says, that we can fully realise our human potential. We only really exist, he said, as we relate to the other, and to the community.
Which is why Rotary for us is so important. And thank goodness, thanks to the very inventive leaders in our Club, we can zoom, live-stream, and face-time and just keep in touch with each other by telephone.
We don’t want anyone to drift off while we negotiate the next few weeks, or months, or whatever.
Stay on board, everybody.
And good luck with the Latin. Especially the gerunds.
John Shepherd.
