On Tribes

 Claire Wilson over at Living Freedom has an excellent post about Our Tribal Future, which is a thoughtful ramble about our essentially ongoing devolution into a tribal sort of society and the kinds of "tribes" that actually work (Tribes, Monastics, Communities).  It is a rather fascinating and thoughtful read and well worth the 10 minutes or so you will invest in it.

As a preface to this consideration, she laments how the tribes in her own life have been breaking down over the last few months - and how rather surprised and saddened she is by this.
It is certainly a thought that has been on my own mind of late as well.

It is interesting - when we moved here 11 years ago I do not know that I would have said I had a "tribe".  I had a few friends, not as a collective whole group but a series of individuals I did things with.  Moving to New Home, as I slowly found activities that I became involved in - Iai, Highland Games - I thought I had found my tribe, both in the physical sense with the individuals I saw physically as well as the connections I made online.  Life felt good: I had friends, I had support, I had a bulwark to weather the storm.

But that feels that it has slipped away over the last few months.

The Plague of 2020 has helped nothing, of course.  I have not thrown since November of last year and it is quite possible I will not throw again until next year.  Iai continues, but due to the Plague we train and then get out as quickly as possible from the Dojo.  And online social media connections have become fraught with the danger of the modern era:  on the one hand, saying anything is likely to lead to issues; on the other, many people do make comments and suddenly the 10% of things you shared in common becomes buried beneath the 90% that you realize you do not agree on.

Suddenly, those tribes you built have essentially evaporated.

My choices are threefold.  The first is simply to continue on as if nothing has happened, that those tribes still exist as they did - difficult, because I know that to not be true.  The second option is to let those tribes go and possibly build another one based on actual needs and interests, not the perceived ones - although I question how much more successful this would be than before.  The third, of course, is simply accept the isolation and prepare to go it alone.

I am not  yet clear on which makes the most sense.

The one thing that I can come out of this with that makes me a bit happy is that I have discovered a tribe of sorts - you, gentle readers, and those that write the blogs that read and follow.  We are certainly much more of the same mindset than many others in the past, and although all of you are far away, we still manage to give some form of moral support and practical advice.

So maybe the choice is a bit easier:  a form of going it alone in the immediate vicinity but knowing that there is a community, out there, backing me up.

In a world of dissolution and abandonment, maybe this is the best we can do.