In the neighborhood I lived in until I was about 24, people were, when I was growing up, quite attentive and bouncy. If you wanted to bake a cake and didn’t have any, you could easily find some at a neighbor’s house. They would ask, they would give various things, both women and men.
We, the children, played together during the day, and in the evenings we stayed with grandparents, and other older neighbors, on the street, telling stories. We would listen late into the evening, we would come into the house in the summer only a few minutes before my mother came home from the second shift. Looking back, it seems to me that we were living that African proverb that says it takes a whole village to raise a child. We, all the children there, were being raised by the neighbourhood, not just our parents. The stories were of all kinds, about wars, spells, life and death, fantastic animals, and miracles.
We listened in fascination, in silence, to stories that often repeated themselves, perhaps imagined by the more creative mind of a neighbour who had just carried her stool from home to the meeting place. We would ask them to repeat a story, even if we knew it by heart.
We read a lot then, we lived in the Gutenberg era, the Marconi galaxy was not yet visible in that neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bucharest, at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, as if suspended out of time. Our imagination was enriched by all those books, all those stories that we fed on a daily basis.
We learned then to be polite to people older than us, to respect them, to let them tell their stories, and to listen to them. It was clear to us that we didn’t know more than they did, we couldn’t. We didn’t want to stand out, we just asked them to tell us more, we were just good listeners.
Nowadays, if you invite several people in a company to lunch, I don’t know how much more willingness there is to sit and chat. Rather, people come and sit as if in a semi-imposed meeting, then leave.
Listening I won’t even mention, what silly demands! We all want to talk, to be heard, to have others listen to us. Besides, another person is not respected until they have earned respect. That is why we manifest ourselves like those dogs that bark at us when we cross the street: defiant, disobedient, without empathy, impatient, and ready to attack at any time, even if no one threatens.
Yet I like to think we have a lifetime to learn, from the young, from the old, from those in other fields than us, from the shop girl at the corner shop, the flight attendant, the florist, the gym trainer, from those who please us, inspire us, and from those with whom we are uncomfortable, who annoy us.
If we don’t believe that we are learning all our lives, that we are like a work in progress, let us at least remember that what no longer evolves dies, so it is good to keep a slit through which light, life, can enter.
It took a village to raise a child, and it takes a caring, curious, decent, enthusiastic, responsible, honest, assuming society to make us humans with capital H.
