The Blackberry Walk

Few enjoy change, especially when it seems it may be for the worse. However in time, Spring and Summer always make way for Autumn and then Winter: nothing in this life lasts forever, and little lasts one's lifetime. We are seasonal beings. Just as our lives begin in Spring, move into Summer, and then into Autumn and finally Winter, the epochs, the chapters, the months across which our narrative threads run through our lives follow that same pattern. Personally, one such Winter has arrived. From the time I entered Uni to today, now that it's been two years since I've graduated, Anisoc has been my community. In the beginning our circle was small, and closely knit. We had long house parties deep into the next morning, and we reverberated the walls with our bellowing karaoke. My June-July period was rainy with Corona hitting, and having to stay indoors at what should have been the heights of Summer. But all was repaid come August-September, where I felt like a king. Once I graduated, the Autumn period of this epoch came, and I was forever exhausted attempting to balance a students social life with three hours of commuting every day. Now I've hit the December: the end of the year, and the end of this era. I know this period of my life has ended, and that I can't continue to go and meet up as I always have. Many of the younger generation I kept returning to meet are now themselves graduating, and they will most likely be scattered to the four corners of the country, and perhaps the world. University is a kind of temporary community, which much like a temporary marriage, can only end in a parting heartbreak. To assemble this group of people once more would be a monumental - nigh impossible - task. There are those who I will stay in touch with, and those who I may never see again. Those very precious friendships I've made through this community will not break, lest something were to happen, or I decide to cease to maintain contact. There is no sense of loss there. It is the sense of the community being broken up in a kind of diaspora: that is where the feeling of heartbreak stems. Those gatherings, parties, and celebrations involving the whole wider Anisoc community have always made me feel apart of something greater, and made me feel at my best. The nature of manliness is very much a core question being wrestled with today. Factions see manliness as dominating women and excessive macho-ness - but this can't be correct. Some conversely see manliness as dominating other men, and want nothing more than to be someone else's superior or boss, and to laud power or money - but nor can this be right. Others see it as Apollonian, and the chiselling of oneself into the perfect Renaissance Man who has command over the arts and his own form. And however tempting this idea has been for me over the years, I don't believe it to be correct. This Apollonian path leads to nought but contempt and despair from idolising vanity. Manliness, as a podcast I used to watch put it, is found within community. It is being able to help the less fortunate or the struggling within the community, or the ability to offer a meal or board to a friend. To be a man is not to be the top of a hierarchy, a top-to-bottom model, but to be in the most central of the concentric circles of a community. This sense of manliness I harvested bountifully from my time at Anisoc. Hosting parties, hosting events, helping people to meet one another to find friends, and perhaps lifelong lovers, is perhaps the most fulfilling and meaningful thing I have ever done. My current community is for a specific age bracket - and being at the upper end of the age bracket for much of my time there, I got to experience that kind of 'village elder' feeling. But as I have said, December has come, and my time there will be no more. There is not much community for me to fall into afterwards, however. Many find community through work, and yet they meet up with colleagues outside of work very infrequently. So many people commute to work now, that their colleagues are strewn across the surrounding area. For instance, I work in Loughborough, yet live near Nottingham; many live in Leicester, Loughborough itself, and Derby, not to mention the various towns and villages in-between. How do so many people meet up and go to the pub? The pub is the very bedrock of community, and alcohol the solvent for the gummed-up British temperament. A work-based community cannot drive to and from the pub, and thus the pub declines. Ultimately, proximity is what is most important. Anisoc was for me a place, not merely a free-floating institution. Because we were all here we could meet up and go to the pub together. No amount of Discord 'communities', as the pandemic taught us, can make up for real in-person connections. What Anisoc created however was something that was almost too good to be true: the alloying of a true in-person community with a niche (however less so by the year) interest. A strange community of cooky people, of misfits, who don't feel as if they'd fit into society at-large. There is always this niggling fear that what I had was too good to be true, and that it'll ring in my memory like a kind of tinnitus to which no future community can compare. But it is the December of this epoch, and within December is Christmas: the birth of Hope into the world. Every Winter begets a new Spring. And no reactionary wound-picking will let the skin grow back afresh. With a heart open, and a charitable disposition, I have faith that in my next epoch there'll be a new community to which I could belong, and a new 'home'. And I believe a community really is a home. To confine one's home to your house is claustrophobic - and if I lived in a house-share, I'm not sure if I could even call my own house a home. A home is where you feel a sense of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; where there is something more than family, friends, and lovers, but a warm and earnest storge. My youth is now certainly over, and I feel immense regrets. How much folly I could have had! How much fun I was too foolish to grab hold of! How many chances I let blow away like autumn leaves. Those leaves have now composted, nourishing the seedbed of the new spring, of the new era, and all I can do is hope for the best. If only life weren't so difficult.

Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, And let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth; Walk in the ways of your heart, And in the sight of your eyes; But know that for all these God will bring you into judgement. Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, And put away evil from your flesh, For childhood and youth are vanity.

- Ecclesiastes 11:9-10