Love thy neighbour

Most religions encourage us to love our neighbours.

It makes a lot of evolutionary sense to do so too, at the very least so that we can expect our neighbours to love us back! Our ancient ancestors, the hunter gatherers needed to protect one another from being eaten by saber tooth tigers and in modern times we need our neighbours to keep an eye on our homes when we go on holidays. However, in the past three months I’ve started to wonder if we’re very neighbourly these days at all.

I don’t love my upstairs neighbour very much, for example.

He spent the first month or so of lockdown engaging in every DIY activity known to humanity. He loved to hammer and drill and saw and bang. When he wasn’t improving his home, he was playing a game called “droppy keys-laughy-hop-hop”. He also enjoys dragging his sofa around the living room, bouncing on his space hopper and practising the haca. I spend a lot of my life rehearsing the conversation I intend to have with him in the future. Alas, when I do see him in the hallway I inevitably say something like “hi there, how are you holding up? Everything OK?” because I fear he will dislike me more than the pain of the noise he makes.

He’s a vast improvement on his predecessors who were a never ending supply of Air B&B guests. Every three of four days a new batch of holiday makers would wander around the building, come home late, forget their keys and ask me for directions or suggestions for the best places to eat and drink. Again, in my mind I would plot and plan what I would say to the strangers, but every time I found myself saying “oh you should definitely go to the Italian quarter for dinner and then over to Temple Bar for drinks and music”. I’d spell the names of pubs for them and say “enjoy your holiday” and then seethe to myself afterwards and all throughout the day.

I didn’t like a little girl I met last Sunday, in the garden of Dublin Castle either.

I was reading my Buddhism for beginners book and learning all about the importance of cultivating loving kindness for all sentient beings, when this little girl approached me. As I assumed she must be one of my 5km radius neighbours, I smiled at her, but she was a little too close for my pandemic comfort. I looked over to her owners on the bench, but they just smiled back proudly so I didn’t know quite what to do. I wanted her to step away to the appropriate two metre distance as recommended by health experts, but I also wanted these strangers to like me! So I didn’t say a word. When she stepped onto my blanket and rubbed my nose for a moment, I laughed my public laugh which translated as “this interaction doesn’t bother me at all, in fact, I’m rather enjoying the spontaneity of it!” When she bored of me and moved on, I thought isn’t that funny? I would literally rather risk death more than risk being unliked by people I don’t even know.

I like to be seen as a helpful neighbour.

That same day, after I left the Castle, I saw a man trip up the curb and have a nasty fall. You know those falls that don’t hurt as much as shake you for a moment, and he looked a little disorientated. I started shouting from across the street “are you OK? Are you OK?” and then I shouted a number of suggestions to him.

“You should sit down for a moment, catch your breath, have a sip of water!”

I have absolutely no medical training or qualifications whatsoever, so I have no way of knowing if my recommendations were in anyway of any use. But onwards I continued. In the end he brushed himself off and went away, possibly more embarrassed by the attention I’d given him than the fall itself.

I was just trying to be neighbourly.

I like some of my neighbours.

I like the woman at the end of the street, who stands outside her house meeting and greeting all the passers by in the morning. I like the guy who takes his dog for a walk half a dozen times a day, and I like the Latvians on the second floor. I became friends with them on the night of the Brexit referendum back in June 2016, when I came home tipsy and got in the lift with them. It was there I apologised on behalf of all British people for the result of the referendum. I told them that I loved Latvia, having only just recently visited Riga for a work trip, and I think they found the whole interaction a little strange but fine. We’ve been friends ever since and they always smile when they see me. Maybe it’s a smirk, but I see it as a smile when they see me.

They’ve been going to work throughout this whole horror shit show, and their three children have been looked after by an ever thinning network of friends and other parents in the same position. If one of them gets ill then the gruesome and grotesque pantomime of normalcy disintegrates and disappears like a water bubble on the surface of a lake in a forest. These two people are risking their health and lives so that they can hold onto their financial security, even though they probably know that The Economy is a mirage; you can see it, but it’s not really there.

I just feel like we are currently failing the most basic, neighbourly ethical dilemma of our time. Remember back in college when you used to sit on the floor drinking wine, sharing spliffs, discussing philosophical hypotheticals? Someone would suggest a dilemma and you would have to answer, and then they’d play around with the details? It’s like that, except we’re doing it for real.

“Would you jump into the rough, icy sea water to save ten children from drowning after their wooden rowing boat had gotten into trouble? Even though doing so would inevitably cause your death?”

“Yes, of course I would, without hesitation!”

“And would you jump into the rough, icy sea water to save…five children?”

“Of course, yes, of course!”

“two children…”

“Um….that’s a harder one, but yes, yes I would”.

“And what about a boat of older people, people with underlying health conditions, zero-hour contract workers and poorer people in general?”

“Oh no. That’s quite different, I’m not willing to save them. In fact, let me swim up to their wooden rowing boat and tip it over so that they all fall into the icy sea water a bit quicker!”

It’s just getting harder as it all goes along, that’s my opinion anyway.

I honestly don’t understand why we closed down the world when there were six thousand corpses, but now that there are over four hundred thousand, we’re opening back up with pleasure and delight. None of it makes any sense to me and it becomes more and more peculiar as time moves on.

I’m going off us as a species to be honest. I think we’re a bit rubbish, which is why I’m spending more time watching wildlife videos on YouTube and documentaries about the non-human animals on our planet.

Seagulls are no longer my favourite birds. They have been replaced with the bar tail godwits. I love these birds more than seagulls for two reasons. Firstly, I love them for their names which are genius, but secondly because these birds make the longest non-stop flights of any of the migratory birds, all the way from New Zealand to Alaska! They fly for seven days and seven nights without any food or rest so that they can go to their breeding ground on the other side of the world.

Isn’t that remarkable?

I came across this YouTube video of them preparing for their humungous journey from New Zealand and I think it might be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. It’s something delightful for World Environment Day, and I really hope you enjoy it.

Take good care of yourselves, and I’ll see you next week.

Posted by ruthelizabethpowell