Village Training

What’s this Village and where can I get one? Can we even function within a small community now? As animals, we’ve evolved from the very sociable simian class into a fractured techno-structure, whose small family often consists of primarily social media contacts and Instagramparents. How can we ever know how our actions affect our society around us if we never see each other? What would we do with this Village if we could even get one? We don’t seem to know where to put this idea of community.

No more ‘practical’ education is available; no shop classes, no home economics, no money management, no basic political structure knowledge. Even in a ‘drone worker’ economy, which is what this type of current education has set up, we still need practical information to function with. What better practical information can there be, than to know what and where our place is in our immediate world. Where is our self-worth?

It’s so easy to feel like a Nothing. As in my ‘Ode to a BLT’, I invoke the power of inter-dependence.

For example:

As an usher at a large performing arts center, my job (when the place is open for business again) is extremely ‘non-essential’. I’m a temporary, part-time, on-call service employee in a luxury industry: a butterfly on the elephant’s bum in the fetid world of career occupations. A Nothing! All I do is put on my penguin suit, and show up smiling. I show people to their seats, I take tickets and ask them to be quiet and turn off their cell phones during performances. Yet I’ve also provided first aid, helped a young veteran with obvious PTSD sit at least halfway through watching a ballet performance without screaming, helped others with disabilities get up and down stairs so they could enjoy being outside of their small living spaces for a while. I’ve had training in emergency situations, and have learned how to keep a large group of excited simians together in one space safely for a relatively short period of time. I am more than the sum of my parts, and so are you.

The whole experience though, is the delicate balance of multitudes dependent upon each other’s cooperation to make it work. From my simple job, I am dependent upon the performers, the audience members, the technicians, the house staff, security, janitorial, concessions, public transportation, parking lot attendance and care, emergency management, utility services, police availability, road works, and the list can go on and on. This experience, this small non-essential thing like a performance is a perfect example of Village thinking. The sum of a thousand small ‘Nothings’ for no grand purpose other than to just be there because they are part of it.

So, Village Training is learning the conscious acknowledgement of connections. Out of that awareness of mutual importance can come the beginnings of respect, and the buds of other good directions like entrepreneurship, inventions and belonging. An animal in a world full of animals, all have a job to do, even ushers. Sometimes you’re the student, and sometimes you’re the lesson. Just try not to be the bad example!

There are no Nothings. There are no Nobodies.

Yeah, it can be embarrassing.