Impermanence itself

The impermanence I think I felt most was the space between what I was seeing, and it’s relationship to myself.  I wasn’t aware of imagining a life, but I must have at some point.  Some important, but unspoken part of it was about owning a house, and creating a home.  And it troubles me still; on one hand something undone, but probably more because I crave the imagined peace that it seems to represent, that I’ve arrived somewhere, and can sigh and fall back into it, into this place where I belong.  Home.  And instead I’ve been in flux, on the move, traveled and travelling, endlessly.  And I can’t shake the sense that something is missing.  Riding through rural America, two things seemed so apparent; firstly that this is a broad human need, this arriving and belonging; secondly that its permanence is entirely false.  Everywhere were houses and homes of those departed, not to be filled.  The very way of living that those ex-homes represented, itself proved impermanent.  And all of those people must have felt the finality of roots that I crave and seek – but time blows it all away.  You can avert your eyes from the clock, but your ears always hear its tick. 

To put it in a local context, perhaps it is like the suburban houses of Pretoria, wonderful things, but victims of time too; slowly but surely they are giving way to the gated community, the town house complex, the golf estate – the more collective than individual. 

I’m not sure whether to refer to the back-roads of Virginia and North Carolina as rural America.  There is something about it that is not really rural, more sparsely inhabited – a collection of small-holdings and small farms arranged around small, and consistently shrinking towns.  That shrinking is the impermanence of that way of life. 

The poverty that is the hand pressing down on that space, squeezing the lives out of it and into the cities is very real, and encroaching.  It may not be poverty in the sense of the shanty-townships of South Africa, but it’s not that far off, and there is a sense of it coming; the eyes are out there in the darkness, closing in.  And that is a massive impermanence.  You can see it in the people, rugged, weather-beaten, physically compromised, missing teeth.  Where we have tik, peri-urban America has tweakers and opioids – the latter being a particular challenge in the areas I’ve been riding through.  There is stuff missing, despite the rural feeling space.  Wholesome food and healthy robust country physiques seem scarce.  Readily accessible healthcare seems too.

There is a really striking paradox, riding through America, which I mentioned to and ended up discussing with a German originating academic on my CCL program, Michael Hoppe.  On the one hand there is the hugely impressive personal and individual commitment to helping others that I’d observed in America.  It’s everywhere.  Its in the numbers of volunteer fire services that you ride past in the back and beyond (for example, an amazing statistic – 70% of all US firefighters are volunteers.  100% of firefighters in small communities (10,000 people or less – so all the places that I’ve mentioned on this trip) are volunteers).  It’s in the friendliness of people who stop to ask you if you want some water.  It’s in the invitation to lunch at the golf course even though you are sweaty and dressed in lycra.   And then on the other hand there is the vehement rejection of any sorts of hand-outs or welfare thinking; a rejection of the free lunch offer, so to speak.  Think about this for a moment: on a personal level, you have a person who, for zero pay, on their own time, will volunteer to run into a burning building and risk everything to help a person-in-need who they don’t know.  But that same person is likely to be completely opposed to any form of welfare system, something that supports a wide range of people-in-need.  It’s understandable, but none-the-less fascinating.  I’d find much more plausible the person who was willing to pay something (a tax, for example) to a fund which employed firefighters, so they didn’t have to do it themselves.   Either way, Michael Hoppe said to me that he had been struck by this paradox when he first came to America, and that he had come to realize that Americans are willing to do anything personal to help an individual in need, but resisted strongly the idea of systematic support of people in need, and the government and welfare system that would necessarily come with it.  Fascinating.