A Saturday in Hackney

Last night was a late one, thanks to our crazy HCD Halloween party at my classmate Emily's place in Clerkenwell.  So today I spent the morning cleaning (while listening to Fleet Foxes whom I love very much, and Yeasayer who I've started listening to recently and also love) and trying to drum up enough energy to actually do something with my day.  Then - laundry done, dishes washed and flat tidied - I decided that I should make my way to Stoke Newington Church Street in search of a nice coffee shop where I could get some reading done.

On my way I walked through Hackney Downs Park, which is right beside where we're living.  The air was nice and cool with a hint of fall but the sun was shining.  The giant sycamores, with their beautifully mottled bark, have turned golden and dropped some of their leaves along the footpath.  The joggers, cyclists and football players in their colourful jerseys were all out and about.  

There's even a newly-planted community orchard in this park!

Along Farleigh Road I stopped to take a photo of this house with its tree.  I love the beautiful row houses of London, especially when they have flower boxes with happy red flowers nodding to their reflections in the windows.

My first stop on Church Street was Of Cabbages and Kings, which is a store that I discovered a few weeks ago and have been meaning to revisit.  It's a sweet little store packed full of handmade everything, from screen prints to necklaces to little crocheted iphone holders, like the one here that I bought for myself today.  I especially love the little red flower button!

 

I asked the girl working the till if there was a particular coffee shop she would recommend for some reading, and she suggested I try out Lemon Monkey back on the High Street.  I followed her advice, and found it to be the sweetest, most welcoming space I could have hoped to find.  Here it is, with my pot of earl grey tea and delicious pistachio tarte with thick cream (and, um, readings).  Mmmmm.....

 Closeup of the tarte.  Anyone who knows me will know how much I appreciated their collection of eclectic, mismatched old wooden chairs.  A shelf full of cookbooks and a couch for lounging on all add to the comfortable, cozy ambience.  I will definitely be coming back here!

Having finished my tarte, tea and one article (yay!), I headed back home to wait for Freddy to get home.  Who has classes on Saturdays?!  Not me...hee hee...

This is where I'm supposed to be.

It’s been a while since I’ve given an update, and I feel like I owe an explanation of what my life is actually like here in this bustling, multicultural, historic city that is London.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s been all buttercups and butterflies.  It’s been tough.  It’s always an adjustment moving to a new place.  The first weeks of the Health, Community and Development (see our Program Director speak about the program here) at LSE  have been exhilarating and terrifying all at once.  The program blends social psychology with community development and health.  If that sounds confusing to you, well trust me - it is for me too!  The psychology-based concepts that underpin what we’re studying are a huge stretch from what I studied in undergrad (Arts Management and Theatre at the University of Toronto).  In the first week in all I could think was – why the hell was I crazy enough to think I could study a completely new discipline at the Graduate level?

So that’s the terrifying part.  Then there’s the exhilarating part, a huge part of which are my amazing classmates.  There are only twenty of us, and we are already a tight family of inspiring, dedicated people who are all here for each other.  Here we are at a house party I hosted recently: 

Coming together from around the globe (Norway, Greece, Ghana, Sudan, Mexico, South Korea, the US and Canada), we all share the belief that communities are where the true magic happens in terms of creating positive social change.  That marginalized communities, in particular, can empower themselves by first questioning and then reversing the inequalities they face.  I can’t even explain how satisfying it feels to be sitting in a classroom at the London School of Economics – one of the most respected educational institutions in the world – learning about how important it is to engage in grassroots, bottoms-up, community-based projects in order to achieve global social justice aims. It’s legitimizing all of the idealistic thoughts I’ve been storing up and mulling over for my whole life.

Clay and Paper Theatre at City Hall, Summer 2005 (I was a coop student)

I’m sure all you critics out there are rolling your eyes and asking - how does this relate to what I want to do with my life?  What kind of career can you build based on such idealism?  These are the million dollar questions everyone loves to ask and I hate to answer – it always makes me feel defensive.  I really should be used to it by now, though.  Criticism and skepticism about my educational and career decisions are nothing new to me.  Telling people in undergrad that I was studying Arts Management and Theatre always resulted in blank stares or utter confusion.  “So…you’re going to run an art gallery?”  People were also confused when I told them I was working as Manager of Marketing and Community Outreach for LEAF, an urban forestry non-profit in Toronto.  “You mean like taking care of parks?” or “Do you get paid to do that?”  And just when people thought they maybe had me figured out, I go and quit my good job to go into mucho debt way over in London England of all places to study such an abstract topic as Community, Health and Development, with the intent of investigating the link between the arts and community health.  “Whaaaaa…..?” 

LEAF's Beaches Toronto Tree Tour, Summer 2006 (just after I got hired!)

I can’t really blame people for being confused, and maybe thinking I’m a bit crazy.  I feel like my whole life I’ve been on a wild goose hunt.  I often think back to the yearbook message Miranda Bouchard left for me when we were graduating from W.C. Eaket all those years ago.  It was something like “you’ve really branched out and done lots of different things at Eaket.  I hope you found what you were looking for”.  I remember reading that and thinking – hm.  I’d never really thought of it that way.  I didn’t really know why I had been so involved in everything under the sun.  What was I looking for, being the student trustee for the school board, co-president of the students’ council, in the school play, etc. etc. etc. in high school?  What was I looking for when I wrote to the Mayor of Thessalon at age 8 asking why there wasn’t more of an effort to regenerate what was quickly becoming a ghost town?  What was I looking for when I was volunteering for 5 different non profit organizations while going to school full time at U of T, working part time and also being the student representative for my program?  What was I looking for when I switched after a year from a job with benefits at a respected performing arts venue to take a pay cut and work with a grassroots, community-based urban forestry non-profit?

Me with (former!) Mayor of Toronto, David Miller

To me, it’s obvious.  All my life, I’ve been focused on a single aim: to figure out how I can make the most realistic, effective, positive change wherever I am.  And now I want to know where, in the long term, I should focus my energies to make that happen.

For some reason, that life goal doesn’t sit well with a lot of people.  That someone should be so idealistic, instead of getting a good job with benefits, is kind of, well, “out there”.  But in the face of this doubt, there are so many people I look to that inspire me and make me think that it’s not a fruitless endeavour:

Naomi Klein, outspoken author, activist and documentary film maker best known for her controversial book No Logo which spoke out against globalization, corporations and consumer culture. Janet McKay, who founded LEAF (Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests) - a non-profit that engages communities in caring for and protecting the urban forest - way before environmentalism was taken as seriously as it is now.  I learned so much from her while working there for two years.  Laura Reinsborough (in the video below, taken from the GreenHeroes website), who founded Not Far From the Tree, an organization I followed from its inception two years ago to its current role as leader of the urban agriculture movement in Toronto.  

Jane Jacobs, urban philosopher and activist who championed protecting local neighbourhoods over rampant urban expansion and who inspired the creation of Jane’s Walks across Canada and the US.  Jane Goodall, famous for her work with chimpanzees and also the founder of Roots & Shoots which makes the crucial link between social change and long-term environmental protection.  Stephen Lewis, the most inspirational speaker I’ve ever heard, former leader of Ontario’s NDP and founder of Stephen Lewis Foundation, which focuses on providing economic support to women who shoulder the weight of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the hardest-hit African countries.  Not to mention all of my amazing friends back in Toronto who work for little pay and recognition for non-profits that do good work, who inspire me every day to keep truckin’.  

Inspirational Friends at Frobel Lake

 Some of these people I’ve met or worked with, others I have just admired from afar.  I’m not putting myself in league with them by any means, but I do feel that their passion and dedication to social justice shows that idealism can be combined with realism to make a career out of making a difference.  The idea that other people – activists, authors, urban developers, politicians, academics, my fellow students – have the same motivations and the same aims as I do is comforting.  And being in the Health, Community and Development program at LSE makes me feel like, for the first time in my life, all of my pursuits have not been in vain.  I feel like I’m finding out, slowly but surely, what I’ve been trying to figure out all these years: what I can do.

Trying Times

I received an email recently from a very dear friend of mine, who expressed to me how, lately, she’s been consumed by feelings of aloneness and uncertainty about where she is going in life, and why.  I wasn’t surprised to hear this, as the “quarter-life crisis” seems to be going through my friends like a plague.  I thought I would share here my response to her, and my thoughts on our seemingly lost and disillusioned generation, in case anyone is interested in hearing my opinion on the matter!

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Dear Friend,

I am sorry to hear that you are feeling so out of sorts.  I can tell you, though, that you are not alone.  It’s interesting - in the past year most of my closest girl friends have expressed similar feelings to me.  And although I’m feeling pretty good about things right now, I too am often struck by the same kind of “wtf” moments.

Almost every night I lie in bed and think about what I’m doing, where I’ve been, and where I’m  going, and what it culminates in is this black hole of helplessness…questions, questions, questions, rhetorically repeating themselves into infinity.  What am I doing.  Why am I doing it.  Where will it get me.  Specifically, right now I am doggedly pursuing my desire to enact social change, through the arts, in communities where social inequality runs rampant.   And I’ve crossed the ocean and am going sixty grand into debt to do it.  The question that haunts me at night is:  is that even possible?  Or is this just empty idealism?

And then there are the larger, even darker thoughts that steal into my head as I toss and turn.  Does it even matter what I do, when every action is so inconsequential in the face of what is happening in this world – with the waters rising, populations increasing, fresh water disappearing, and our global system plodding along, unstoppable, ever a slave to the consumer-driven greed of our capitalist system?  I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, and it’s not like I’m obsessed with Armageddon or death, but in the face of both of those impending things I feel like any decision I make is pointless.  How’s that for optimism?!

And I think it’s hardest on our generation – and maybe especially the women of our generation – than it has been for generations past.  It’s like the pretenses have all been stripped away for us, and we’re left with reality standing there in all its stark and hideous glory, with us unable to take our eyes off of it.  What good are our dreams and aspirations, our desire to change and shift the world, if in the end we are marching steadily not only to our own demise but a possible descent into social chaos, the destruction of world order, possibly to the extinction of humankind?  And I know it’s not just me that has these moments of hopelessness.  Jane Goodall touched on this phenomenon, wide-spread in the youth of today, in a 2007 TED talk which I would really recommend listening to.

 For those of us who have come to adulthood having developed a tendency to care deeply about things – about people, about community, about the environment, about ourselves – all of this is particularly difficult to come to terms with.  We are, like you said, at the point of life where “everyone is expecting you to say something more profound, or have you feet on the ground, and your head in the air ready for anything, working for something”.  And here we are, looking around at each other, wondering if anyone else around us has more answers then we seem to.

So all this to say, I guess, I hear you when you say you are terrified.  Maybe we are terrified for different reasons, but I am terrified too, and I think a lot of other women (and probably men) our age are as well.  Now, this could be taken as a comfort or as just another reason to be, well, terrified!  But I think it should be the former.  We are in this together.  I am rooting for you, and you are rooting for me.  And one thing that I think will save us in this world – as individuals and as communities – are people like you, and me, believing in each other, believing in our right to be happy, believing that we can make something good of our lives, and something good for the people in our lives.

Over the past few years, I’ve really been to some pretty dark moments of doubt and unhappiness.  I have always been an ambitious person, and to reach a point in life where I can’t see clearly where that ambition should lead or how or why it should lead there was…deflating, to say the least.  But what brought me out of this was a renewed focus on being content.  It was Stefania who said to me, that maybe happiness is too much to ask for – that we should focus instead of being content.  It’s a smaller goal, it demands less of us, but if we get there we can find peace with ourselves and with the demands of our environment.  It is just a matter of bringing good things - comforts, simple pleasures - into our lives.  Getting back to doing what we love.  And above all, giving ourselves a break and expecting less of ourselves.

We only have one tiny stretch of time in an infinite universe of existence, and I think the most we can aim for in that time is to spend as much of our lives being as content as we can.  It’s not about knowing exactly where you’re going or how to get there.  It’s not about having the most money, the best boyfriend, the most impressive job.  It’s not about having the most active social life, or even making the most difference in your community.  If these things happen in your life, it should be gravy.  The meat and potatoes that we need to live on are the things that give you that little warm glow of peace inside, that lead to soft, far-away gazes and subtle smiles.

It’s different for everyone, but think of the things that lead to this inner contentment as those which are easily experienced, as often as you need them to be.  For me it’s keeping close to my family and my most genuine and inspiring friends, and letting them know how much they mean to me.  It’s being by a lake.  It’s sitting by a campfire, or remembering the smell of woodfire in the fall.  It’s cooking while singing along to Leonard Cohen.  It’s having faith in my inner artist - writing, taking pictures, and going to life drawing classes that let me explore and express and release.  It’s doing yoga – the kind of yoga that brings me to a place where I can breathe better and relax more than I ever thought possible.  And my two favourites – because of their constancy and ease of access – are having a warm cup of tea and a good book to read.

So I don’t know if this helps at all, all of this theorizing and I know it all sounds a bit idealistic and maybe doesn’t help if you still feel lost in the grander scheme of things.  But I believe that if you find your small comforts, and focus on them, and keep yourself happy, then the rest will follow.  Don’t think you have to have it all figured out.  Don’t think you have to know where home is.  Don’t worry about being terrified, or about being alone.  We’re all terrified, and we’re none of us alone.  I have so much faith in you.  And it’s not faith that is predicated on you doing anything world-changing (although I don’t doubt you could and maybe you will).  I have faith that you will find your own way of being content, and at peace with yourself, and that you will continue to enjoy great joys and loves and and laughs and all those little things that make our lives worth living.  Because you are one of the funnest, most joyous and most caring people I know.  You are a unique and beautiful person.  And so you are already a success – everything else is just gravy.

All my love,

Robin