I don't really write blogposts for others. That sounds a little self obsessed - i may have in the long past, but one thing that 2020 and 21 has shown me is that with so many spending so much time online for whatever reason from 'company' otherwise isolated,  to it being the only way to interact with service providers, I feel something of a butterfly mentality seems to pervade. The  quick connection and flurry of communication and then one or both communicants have gone elsewhere; and sequential conversation seems  harder than ever.

The Portuguese word saudade is interesting. Perhaps has something to offer us in good focus. It essentially means an awareness of something good about life in the past sustains and maybe can in fact even be revitalised as a guiding ethos. But of course as we have 'lived' that past phase we know what it is to live it and anything next that is some return  must be thus more than lip service. 

I think it is a word i need to ponder further. 

This is specifically not 'a saudade': Though it is connected to the person  - a Portuguese acquaintance, who shared with me the provisional translation i added in "is not finished". In other words it is not sentimental or only some lament for what is lost. It may be possible to reclaim that valuable existence. 

I had a rather fine 2020 for several reasons. There was however one moment - only one really,  when i encountered a large dose of reality that i found depressing to say the least.

But before i get to that I also had a deeper positive moment  - with all that wonderful  time to think, space to let good thought come.

Some people - maybe a fair few,  time free and maybe a new sincerity as of this year, i had a chance to spend long quality time with a few people from different cultural background.  I have had a life - all my adult life,  prior around 15 years ago, living in or having significant connections  with people from, all sorts of cultures worldwide.

Maybe this year i figured the true benefit of knowing other mindsets - observing close up how a cultural construct does make a different human. It is just how hopeful this is in fact for humanity.

2016 here in Uk and as we know other countries various political developments rather shook up the goldfishbowl. The waters in my opinion became too muddied by overclaiming certain specific developments such as 'hate' and 'anger'. I tend to think that many are a little more bolshie and i wonder if one reason for this is spending far longer than ever before looking into small screens which never leave you feeling that nice about anything even your own persona.

I happened to go to Bolivia 3+ years ago. I went for a family reason  - my daughter was there, rather than any new desire to travel at that time. I had looked it up on Wikipedia beforehand and the pit of my stomach rather contracted at seeing the words "South America's Poorest Country". Thoughtbubble: oh that's not too hopeful then  ..... in terms of even getting out alive...

(In the 90s Much of S America having a reputation as a little cutthroat at times).

I have travelled the world and nothing moves me that much any more. Bolivia was by far the richest society however I have ever enjoyed.  A country of laughter and lack of cynicism. A genuine curiosity in other human beings too. 

I think at the time there were no McDonalds at all and very few Western style nighttime venues. I did one evening go to one widely advertised Planet Hollywood style eatery in Cochabamba  that was a sad harbinger for the wave of Disneyfication starting even there. But it was still very much yet to be.

It did however so throw me at first to see the Cholitas - Bolivian women who proudly wear a kind of traditional costume  and certainly it is not for the tourists as there are few. It symbolises I believe a solidarity with modern Bolivia  - incidentally remade as a rather beautiful egalitarian society  after a part violent  mini revolution period in the mid 00s which was  started by supremely brave women in the main standing up to the colonial powers who had all bust stolen their country for decades. Many of these women lost lives resisting in the main US corporate  rapaciousness which even privatised the rainfall in cities (film Even the Rain is gorgeous)  

 

This photo may not seem much but the backstory makes it to me about the most poignant I have ever taken. Several days no sleep travel to get to LA Paz en route further into the rural areas(a magnificent encounter en route  - another brave anti establishment person) .  Tired and even emotional, will I even find my daughter? And then this little angel was run by me. The vision brought me back to earth - hers.

So, the Cholitas hours on their phones as they hawk their wares in the marketplaces. Of course I can have no knowledge of what content they are involved in. 

But it was more the Portuguese woman i sat with a few weeks ago  - she like many her life curtailed in certain ways did have time to let herself out. And the different ingrained mentality even of someone here 8 years was apparent. And it hit me recently in that really is 'hope'.  With so many cultural variants and some are quite significant this Western (cynical) somewhat rapacious variant is just one of many. It could even change. For real. 

Everyone has spoken for decades of "life speeding up". Not really in my opinion. But saudade as a living word, and my own interest in it the last few years having homed in on it only recently but as a bit of an internationalist poetical person for many years, is perhaps a good exercise. If change is to come, then what from past experience and ways is worth pondering as to be worthwhile attempting to reinsert into life? I think it is a worthy project to riff upon. I do not mean sentimentality, and certainly not harking back to some vision of Britain in the 50s. In fact myself I am still interested in genuine equalities that took hold in the 60s and 70s  - I  wonder if they have not gone backwards a little.

But now  the hard bit. With so much time to sit and just be in 2020 especially as parks reopened even though I have my favoured many sq miles of deserted parklands and near wilderness places I frequent, there was one day I sat and soaked in the autumn sun 2020  in a local lovely park. I suppose i was there curious about how people be emerging. 

I wonder if the words anger and even hate are overused. I am not even sure if there is much real 'hate' around anywhere even if it is constantly claimed to be so. I prefer the word angst. Or just bolshiness.

Maybe there was an element of school-is-out even if they hadn't been to school for months but it was the period when schoolfriends began to congregate anew, but that day and in fact it was one of several when i felt something for real that i hope one day the culture could turn around from. 

   

I live a few miles from a very small town. Not much larger than a large village. There is a stable and not exactly pressured community. But something has changed and i assume it is real. From five or six year olds up to teenagers - but it was the eight or nine year olds i sat slightly jaw dropped overhearing their engagement, the many small groups gathered that day were  almost all shouting and swearing with such forceful angst I could hardly believe what had become. Aggression and pointed loud vulgarity seemed to have become the language of these children. No one sat and gently riffed. Everything was loud and melodrama. Everything was an issue to be volubly expressed. It seemed almost a new culture really had been born. And i cannot see this being that good for future functional harmony.

But it is remembering how many genuinely different cultures or mindsets there are that to me is the hope. I suspect someone is going to have to do a lot of work with this nowadays youth to help them find some more balanced setting.  But recalling often how different other human arrangements can  indeed lead to something different I think we need as help in this. It doesn't have to be so. But may take decades to help back to something a bit more good for them.