Next year in…

The wish for restoration in the Passover Seder “Next year in Jerusalem” was poignant this year. Where will we be when the words are next used at the end of September? There is a great desire for a new dawn, a new day, but looking at the political landscape I can see bigotry and mauvaise foi, and I cannot see the wide spread of justice like an everflowing stream that so many of us desire. Utopias are precisely that: places that are ou-topoi, no-places. The British Library, in its excellent trail through the literature, explores a possible play on words between eutopia, a good place, and utopia, asking “Can a perfect world ever be realised?”

If, as Kathleen Jamie suggests of St Kilda, “their way of life broke on the wheel of the modern world,” it may be that this also signals how little validity there is in the harking-back of current political rhetoric. The eutopias of the past are Ealing Studio films (Comedies?) only: ou-topias. However, it’s possible to find personal places in a “when and where were you happiest?” sort of way. In Looking in the Distance, Richard Holloway is at his most plangent as he describes his “fierce and sorrowful anger” on a return to his old theological college: We know that nothing lasts yet the sudden awareness of our own finitude can surprise us into grief… But not always grief: they can be places of beauty and joy. The woods in Spring and Autumn above Nettlebed with Maggie might be such a place for me. Iconic for me (as anyone who has read back in my posts) is the visit just before we were were asked to stay home when Mat Tobin and I went to Uffington, the memory of which has sustained me when I have felt miserable during lockdown. Aberlady, Gradbach, Wychwood, Nettlebed… all sorts of places can do this, and can be the cloud of witnesses that surround us on a grey day or in a time of confinement. Here is a collage of photos of such places – places that are some of my eutopoi:

I notice how selective I am when choosing these photos: the hill of Ludchurch, Aberlady Bay, Uffington, the Lye Valley: outdoors places rather than, say, the churches of Rosslyn, Cordoba or Durham, or the Bodleian, or Magdalen.

These eutopoi suggest something about where I feel wholeness. However, I look at these airy, quiet places and see they are not the places I am regularly: the kitchen; the allotment; my preferred social media platforms… They are outdoors, rural or semirural heterotopias, where difference is key. I am often accompanied by people dear to me: I experience both the Kaplan’s notion of escape and a social aspect that I think is connected – for me – to their idea of fascination (the link here takes you to one of my explorations of their work). These good places might be a delight of solitude, but often for me have a human presence, a human perspective to them – but it is easy (maybe – under normal circumstances, at least), to pick a friend and go somewhere like this. The “human aspect” of fascination is about a compatible voice, a hand to hold.

So when I look to wholeness, wellness, I have to ask what the human aspect actually is. It’s a tough question when dealing with mental health, not just because, thrown on our own resources I come back time and again to my own mental health, but to a bigger question about “When This Is All Over:” what will wellbeing be like? I hope it will include pubs, hugs, time together, as well as all the bigger societal things, but thinking personally (and irrespective of the broader political machinations particularly) here I am struck by a suggestion from Jon Reid on Twitter today that has brought me right back to the present, a brilliantly simple humanistic examen that asks us to identify:

• Three ways I have looked after and cared for myself and
• Three ways I have looked after and cared for others

It is really tempting to see September (or January or 2022 or even the next scheduled General Election) as a time when everyone will vote for a humanity-based society where peace and justice take into account the needs of the most vulnerable, where society is a seen as a whole entity, full of interconnections and mutual dependencies, where truth is embedded in politics more than vote-grabbing, where care workers are paid properly… and yet I don’t believe it will come. So let’s take the “next year” wish and (to nick an idea wholesale from William Blake – but he is not alone in wishing it) build our own places of wellbeing and belonging, around three daily occurrences of self care and three of care for others. It will be up to us to kindle that hope into something bigger.

It is a start at least. Each pool of light might connect with others.