Community - Life at Slow Speed 2-11-10

Anderson, South Carolina

In the early 1980s I was referred to as ‘our second dad’ by four little kids living in Birmingham. For one that never married or fathered children, this was a rather august title for me to hold. I have vivid memories of spending time with this amazingly happy and ‘successful’ family, a family that could measure its success by things such as the number of times a large red dinner plate was put out on the south end of the kitchen table, proclaiming to its user “You are Special Today.” I left that table well satisfied many times. When I went through the nightmare of a catastrophic neurological diagnosis, this family was with me through the Valley of the Shadow. The distance of twenty years has given me a sense of safety from what was a wrong diagnosis.

Alas, that same twenty years has reduced this once vibrant chapter of my life to little more that a rare group forward in one of my e-mail accounts. My personal e-mails are unanswered for the most part. I just received another one of those group e-mails on behalf of one of their now-grown sons, one recounting a recent move to a little paradise in the southwest of France to take up a new life there. From reading the assorted links in this e-mail I have a sense that this new life includes a fine wife, originally from the Lyon region of France. The dimming effects of time, speed, and distance make my present image of this family murky at best.

Embedded within a linked blog was a message of absolute clarity; one about the secret to building true community, about finding a way of life that will scratch the deepest itches in one’s soul. Sometimes e-mail can be really redemptive and clarifying. Jeff comments. “As an inhabitant of Auch put it himself, if life in Toulouse is lived at 200 km/hour, life in the Gers is lived at 50 km/hour. To that I would add: put life in the US in general at 500 km/hour, to get a real picture. What a change! We came from the States with the old adage clearly printed in our minds: “time is money,” only to find that it did not hold true here... or so it seems, at least. People are clearly not so much time-oriented in the Gers, but more so people-oriented and “quality of life - oriented”, if you will. They work very hard and have a good work ethic (a lot of farmers, small-business owners, and artisans) , but I would suggest that their productivity does not so much depend on time as it does on good relationships and quality of life.”

My memories of southern France are not unlike Jeff’s. It amazed me that the entire country shuts down everyday from noon until 2 PM, that it still does. Dining is an epic event, a destination, not an intermediate stop. Most vivid in my memory is the sense of public space where everyone congregated, just sitting and chatting, men playing their form of giant adult marbles, no thought being given to the next place to be or the next task to be torn into. Mindfulness to one’s present moment was fully evident.

Some twenty years ago Bernt Amadeaus Capra produced an amazing film called “Mind Walk”, filmed entirely on a glorious tiny island off the coast of France, a speck of medieval wonder called Mont Saint Michel. Based on the bestselling physics book, The Turning Point, by his brother Fritjof Capra, the viewer was taken into an amazing world where changing one’s perspective could produce an entirely different life experience. Liv Ullmann portrayed an intense Norwegian quantum physicist who mused out loud about the transformative effects of systems theory and systems thinking. The film was well seasoned with entrancing concepts from quantum mechanics and particle physics.

The whole concept of systems theory is nearly anathema to a culture based on individualism and ever increasing competitiveness. In her role, Ullmann nearly begs an American presidential candidate to consider a world view, one grounded in the hard science of physics, in which all things and all beings are part of a greater fabric, one in which none of us live as islands. As a frustrated communitarian and idealist, this film was therapy to my soul the many times I viewed it. Alas, in the blur of life, my copy of it has long since disappeared.

A great source of angst for me has long been this sense that we in America live on a journey consisting of a chain of uncounted intermediate stops, never arriving at a meaningful destination. I am reminded of travellers caught in red tape, trapped for years, living in airport terminals in France. In a celebrated case, a stateless man lived in Charles De Gaulle Airport for seventeen years.

This sense of people living in terminals is no more obvious than in American churches. The largest church in my county (13,000 members) cancelled its Sunday evening service so that people could watch their plasma screens and joint 107.5 million others in watching the Super Bowl. Some Catholic parishes made the unprecedented move of cancelling masses. A church in my neighborhood has each year been shortening its mid-week programming because of pressure from members to do so, citing a million things needing to be done elsewhere. My own church did away with its midweek service due to lack of interest. The midweek dinner is a hurried affair with serving beginning at 6 PM and the room usually cleaned and empty by 7 PM. Our annual breakfast was allotted little more than twenty five minutes. There is an articulated sense that there are simply too many other urgent things to be taken care of ‘out there’.

I think of those warm evenings in France where the best conversations are just getting started at 7 PM, where meals might last four hours, relationships last for decades. Here in the 500 km/hr American culture meals are fifteen minute refueling stops, friendships have degraded to group-forwards.

In recovery there is a sound byte, “A drunk will get you drunk a lot sooner than you will get him sober.” I can only hope that the people living in that grand little town in southwest France will have a lot more influence on Jeff than he will on them. Perhaps he can come back one day and teach us that time is not money, rather instead life itself. Perhaps, even how to live.