Anti-Oppressive Practice: New windows
A university lecturer I knew some years ago once mocked a student's excitement that her family were getting new windows in their council flat. The derision was casual, almost unconscious. Her joy, her pride in something that meant real material improvement in her home and her life, was somehow inappropriate to him. Misplaced. Too small.
I've thought about that moment a lot nearly twenty years since. What it revealed wasn't just snobbery, it was a complete failure to notice the wider field. An inability, or an unwillingness, to hold someone else's reality alongside his own.
On making contact
I'm on the train, phone in hand. The carriage is full but somehow also empty. The person opposite me is on FaceTime, half-present, their gaze moving between the screen and the middle distance. The person at the ticket office serves me whilst scrolling - and I notice, as they do, that I'm doing exactly the same thing. We are both somewhere else. I wonder about these passing moments - these brief, unremarkable contacts between strangers - and what happens to them when attention is already somewhere else. Including mine.
On putting things down
The facilitator caught in a moment of conflict. Her bracelets jangling. She takes a moment and says, caught up in the back and forth of a charge between two people: I'm not so good with speed.
The room softens. Something releases.