Community

 I took the scenic route home from work tonight. There was a gnarly accident on the freeway, so it was a matter of getting home in twenty minutes rather than an hour and forty-five. (It's six miles. An hour and forty-five minutes to go six miles. I mean...)

I enjoy the occasional foray into the uncharted territories of modern suburbia. I find that it fills in the bits of my mental map that are generally left blank by virtue of the fact that there are Big Roads circumnavigating them that offer a more expedient voyage to one's chosen destination. I'm all for the old "the shortest distance between two points" argument, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it's nice to slow down a bit.

It was gray and misty. Plenty of leaves scuttling around on the pavement. People and dogs out for their evening constitutional. Christmas lights. It was pleasant. My route, as suggested by Google, went through a section of my town which I believe is called 'Poets' Corner'. Isn't that...well, it's a bit twee, actually, but never mind.

You see, my town doesn't have what you would traditionally think of as a downtown. I've found that the different neighborhoods each have their own nexus--a strip mall or shopping center providing a little common ground. Little communities within the bigger one. I found one on my way home I'd never passed through, and it was quite appealing. It was a bit of a time capsule--the architecture was a 1970's hangover to be sure, but I thought that lent it some character. Times being what they are, the likelihood of my getting to go back and explore it are slim to none for the foreseeable future, but I've tucked that little morsel of geographical interest away for another time.

Passing through it got me thinking about communities. We all belong to them. We have different ones for different things. You might have a school community, a work community, a neighborhood community, a church community, the list is endless. It's almost certainly always been this way, but as we've expanded as a species, so has our reach across communities. Things get crowded, people get all up in each other's business, some people move away. For a while, the ones who moved away are on their own. A microcosm of human community. But by and by everyone else horns in, and the cycle repeats. Pond ripples of human interaction. An infinity of Venn diagrams.

It's certainly more global now than it's ever been.

Isn't it funny, though, how many of us feel like we're farther apart than we've ever been?