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In Conversation #007 — When Connection Does Not Hold
The first thing I do when I arrive in a new place is walk. Early morning. Before the city has arranged itself for the day.
The walk is communion. Sunrise is a greeting between the self and the world. I am meeting the place, and the place is meeting me. This exchange is how I arrive.
As a woman and a Black person, the walk also answers questions I cannot leave open. Can I move here freely. When does safety shift. Who is on the street and how do we connect in passing. I am not being anxious. I am learning to read my environment. My body reads an environment before my mind decides whether to stay.
This morning practice is possible in most places. Not all.
In 1998, I was living in Johannesburg. South Africa was four years out of apartheid. In Joburg, the walk was possible. When I traveled to Cape Town, it was not. The structure of separation remained intact. Beyond the law. In the air. In how space was organized. Around whose comfort the city was arranged.
For someone arriving from elsewhere on the continent, the hostility compounded. Xenophobia ran alongside the architecture of race. Connection did not extend across those lines.
Apartheid organized a place around exclusion. It diminished everyone inside it, including those it claimed to serve. The place thinned. What remained was arrangement without texture, comfort without ease.
That thinning is what I have come to recognize as structural loneliness and structural isolation. Not the feeling of being alone or excluded. The experience of being inside something that was not shaped to hold life with dignity.
Most of us have felt it without naming it.
A workplace where you perform without belonging. A neighborhood where you are tolerated without being included. An institution that serves its image more than its people. What is said in words but not in action. Intention without regard to outcome and impact. In history that excludes. In spaces that constrain. In environments that accommodate without adjusting. In environments that welcome without making room.
The disconnection is part of the arrangement. When a place is stripped of life and connection, isolation and loneliness become the outcome. Not loneliness as emotion. Loneliness as condition and a form of environmental disconnection.
Naming this changes the question. Attention moves away from self-correction. It moves toward structure and connection with life and living. What does this place allow to extend between people; between life. What does it constrain. And what becomes possible when the conditions change.
One thing worth carrying: the ground determines what can grow between people, life and living.
— Judithe
Notes written while a book is becoming.
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