Connections

It was something that I was certain of. While friends with new jobs and newly found riches started looking for nests of their own, which they could furnish as they wanted, where they could play music as loud as they wanted and have all the privacy they could wish for, I felt otherwise. 

I wanted to be around people.

To say I would have been ok being around any kind of people would be an exaggeration. After having lived in student dormitories where people did not clean up the kitchens or toilets after they used it, I was painfully aware of how living with the wrong type of people could make the experience  absolutely horrible. However, assuming there was a certain level of respect and shared responsibility, that experience could be flipped. Not only could it be flipped, but it was evident to me how the constant presence of other people in your life, the conversations you had with them, the stories, moments, things you shared with them almost daily was so critical to my mental and emotional well being.

A good example was the office space. I have the luxury of working for a company that have extremely flexible work-from-home rules. Despite that, I make the effort to make the hourly trudge to office almost all of the time. For unlike at home, where one is isolated from everyone else, office space always offered the little comforts. Such as asking a colleague to go for that coffee break to take your mind of that stressful meeting, sharing jokes at the absurdity of workplace bureaucracy, gossiping and complaining about the new colleague who was making life difficult for everyone else. 

The truth was and remains that life and a lot of that comprises life, such as work, relationships, can be difficult and it was in the sharing of these difficulties with others that life was made easier. Moving to a new house where one was constantly in the presence of strangers, had to adhere to new rules and sometimes be at the receiving end of the occasional bad moods of your housemates was stressful , but the chit chats, the shared meals and the evening coffees helped to alleviate the loneliness that is typical of big cities. Plus it taught you (if you cared) to be less selfish, to empty the dishwasher even if it was not explicitly your job, to buy that bag of potato chips so that you could share it over tea, to bring down the rubbish if you saw it was full. Initially I would measure my contribution, see if it commensurate to what they did for me, but I realised the more I gave without counting, the happier that I was. It started to teach me a valuable thing about relationships, that real joy came from giving, from sharing and from accepting the little imperfections.