Autumn

In the Northern Hemisphere, we move into Autumn. The arc of the sun shrinks on the horizon. Days shorten. The light becomes sharper on clear, dry days.

It is easy to ignore the turning of the seasons in an urban environment. Our lives, tied to illuminated panels, large and small, are less impacted by the shrinking hours of natural light. The projected world, a transmitted construct of bytes and code, fuses with the natural world in our distracted minds.

Get out. Look around. Breathe deeply. Leave the iPhone at home. Walk (not ride) in the world and look at the houses, the trees, the gardens. Meet the eyes of your neighbors. Stop and talk with someone who is working or sitting in a yard or on a porch.

The time is coming when this activity will be more difficult, less attractive. Take advantage of the season. Be present in your natural environment, whatever and wherever it may be.

Awareness

Riding the subway yesterday afternoon, during the early rush hour, I was impressed with the lack of awareness of my fellow passengers. Small incidents with large implications for society, in my opinion. During my long ride, several people were forced to push past a fellow passenger when a polite "excuse me" was totally ignored. These same polite passengers were then given annoyed or glaring looks by the person who ignored them and was pushed.

Exhausted iron workers, many of whom live in my community, holding heavy lunch coolers or tool bags, stood half asleep in the aisle over oblivious teenagers, playing with their iPhones and taking up two seats with their schoolbags. An elderly man with a cane stood while a young woman sat with her seven-year-old child and stared up at him with indifference. A gaggle of day-schoolers, most likely commuting from a private school, occupied a section of the train and loudly shared comments about pornography sites they were viewing on their iPhones. None of the adults near them seemed to notice or care.

I laugh at the touted concept that it takes a village to raise a child. I am reminded of the cult film, The King of Hearts (1966), in which inmates from an asylum escape and take over a nearby village after it is abandoned during WWII.

The general isolation of individuals in society is evident everywhere. This alienation has a corrosive effect on a culture. Having lived in Manhattan in the late 1980s, before the current Renaissance began, I can attest to the eventual effects of this process. Those effects are not pleasant. I am quite sure that the pseudo-intimacy of virtual communities will not help, but will give people more incentive to retreat to their screens when the real world becomes more and more inhospitable.

Simple awareness could do so much to remedy this trend. The Boston of my younger years was a place where people interacted readily on sidewalks and subways. It was a place where passers-by offered to carry groceries for a struggling pedestrian or stopped, without being asked, to give directions to tourists who were showing signs of being lost. We were aware of our surroundings, our neighbors. This is not a fuzzy, warm memory, summoned by nostalgia. It was truly the way it was.

In my own life, I still persist in maintaining public awareness. My age and its impact on my energies has tempered my ability to intervene in some situations, but I practice general openness to people on the street or on the subway. I make eye contact. I often offer a smile. I find myself giving directions quite a bit as a result and occasionally helping someone with a bundle or some other minor need. It makes me feel like I still belong to this human society and that I am still a contributing member of it.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving about what and to whom?

Traditional societal holidays are clung to by those who benefit from a traditional, conservative society. They are ceremonies of validation. They are fortifications of conformity. Since these holidays have a core value of generosity and fraternity, they are far from offensive, even to social outsiders. However, the degree to which these holidays excite and amuse is proportional to the socioeconomic status of the celebrants.

Could we have an annual holiday of self-evaluation, honesty or meditation? Would those in power support a measure to give everyone the day off for these activities, which do not entail buying food or consumer goods?

Thanksgiving is like the celebration of a successful dice game. If the genetic and socioeconomic variables of your birth and subsequent life are lucky, you might be more prone to be thankful. However, if your variables have been most unlucky, Thanksgiving may well seem a hollow gesture. Many rush to religion in the latter situation. Imaginary friends, judgmental deities, these support a delusion that life has some humanly rational underpinnings. This is simply balm or opiate.

If society were truly human, in the fullest and finest sense, every member of it would indeed have great reason to be thankful every day of the year.