What does it mean to belong?

On Saturday I spent two hours with a fellow mediator asking this question of random strangers crossing the plaza outside Elephant and Castle tube station and we heard some very interesting answers.

The most striking aspect of this experiment was that the people who stopped to talk to us went straight to the heart of what it meant to them to belong, both personally and as a part of the human condition. They all talked about family, relationships, friendships, people, connection. We both had conversations with men in their twenties who talked about their need to find themselves first, as individuals and separate from their family and community beginnings, in order to then choose where and how they wish to belong. One man’s quest involved a very painful physical and emotional separation from everyone he had known and loved. Another talked of the rage he saw in his mother as he was growing up, a rage he could never understand as a child. His mother ‘came here’ in 1973 and as an adult he thought her deep -seated anger may have come from her sense of not quite belonging, of not fitting in. 

I summoned the courage to have a conversation with a man sitting on a bench, who looked as though life had thrown a few difficulties his way. We were offering people post cards with the words ‘What does it mean to belong?’ written on them and when I held one out to him, he looked up with one cloudy eye, blackened broken teeth and hissed at me ‘ Go and pick on someone else,’ waving me away.  When I looked back, he had left his bench and I felt bad for disturbing him.

Twenty minutes later he reappeared and joined in a conversation I was having with an earnest young man who was telling me about his course in Creative Writing and English.

He asked the young man ‘Do you know the alphabet?’ and after some initial confusion and misunderstanding about which alphabet and whether there was more than one, the older man said,

‘So when I say to you, A, what do you say back?’  

‘B’ was the reply.

‘And C?’

‘D.’

‘E?’

‘F!’

The old man smiled and said, ‘There you go!’ and walked away, sagely nodding his head.

A couple who shook their heads vehemently at the offer of a postcard, mistrust in their eyes about the motive behind the gesture, continued to watch for a while and when they could see that there was no sales pitch, no attempt at conversion or coercion, the man stepped forward and said ‘I'll have one of them.’ 

He wanted to see all the postcards in my hand and chose one with a picture of a river valley, so we talked about rivers, the sea, trees, the ozone layer and how we ‘need to stop chopping down all the trees because we need the oxygen’.  His wife showed me a train ticket from Dover – they had left London years ago and come back just for the day to see how it had changed. They’d been to see Eros at Piccadilly Circus, and did I know that since they refurbished him, his arrow was pointing in a different direction? They were planning to come back in December to see the lights.  I asked what they liked about Dover and he extolled the virtues of the fishing and told me a story of a trip to A&E with a fishhook stuck in his thumb. We compared identical scars on our thumbs, mine from a hook impaling me when I was a child playing with the beautiful coloured feathers my father used for fly tying. 

It took just one simple question to prompt all these conversations, just one question to open the door to dialogue, to meaningful connection,  even with a random stranger, even for just ten minutes in the midst of passing people on a drizzly Saturday afternoon.