If you were to look out across your city from up high, what do you see? Is it lit up like this with twinkling lights, is it large or small, with tall buildings or lots of trees, can you see the rivers or the sea? It is beautiful isn't it from a height?
See them down there from way up in the sky, can you see them move or just the lights from the cars? Do you see their faces, their families, the work they do, the successes they have, the failures too? Can you see what life is like for them, do you see their hopes and wishes, their dreams, their desire?
If you saw all of the connections and relationships that webbed out through the city, the millions of strands that connected all of the people to one another, what would you think? How many of those strands are connected to you, how many of them have helped you be where you are today? Do you see the community?
Cities are amazing things, they survive it all, war and famine, empires falling and conquerors rebuilding, names change, and governments too. All of the inhabitants come and go for generations and generations, some are newcomers, some will walk away and never return but, the city lives on. It has a heartbeat and at any one time, the thing that pumps it is the community within. The people it holds are its lifeblood and without them, it is nothing more than concrete and steel, devoid of a soul.
From up high it is easy to look out and see the beauty of the lights but it is only when you descend down to the streets that the complexity begins, complication based on the simplest of tasks, to survive. To make it through all of the struggles that are faced, to get a job, pay the bills, find friends and perhaps a partner, to educate or deal with a baby who cries, a sick parent, an aching neck.
All of those strands are unique and have pressures applied, each with a mix of skills to cope, each under tensions unimaginable to another but always tied to the central core, to the soul of the city, the community itself. Though still while surrounded, many feel alone, they feel incapable to reach out for a hand and in the coldness, no warm voice comes forth.
People are too busy to stop, to concerned with their own lives to notice that the fibres that tie are starting to fray, the knots that bind beginning to loosen but, from your height you can see, the lines pulled tight to snap between those who once walked hand in hand, the connections lost between friends from days gone.
Can you hear the frustration in the voices on the winds, do you recognise the anger in the tone? Do you see the depression on the face of the pretty girl sitting on the park bench or the shame on that of the father struggling to pay the rent?
What happened to the cities where a community walked to drum out the beat? What happened to the lending of a hand or a shoulder against which to lean? So many all battling for the same, a little space to call their own next to another they call a friend. How many hands does it take to change the culture within, how many many minds to solve the problems it faces, the challenges it holds. Perhaps it takes just one.
But from up high, we do not see that we have dropped the glass that collects us and it has fallen to the streets below to shatter upon the stone. As the pieces explode the sharp edges cut what is left of the web and all that remains are shards of the whole. Where do we start, how to rebuild, how to retie the strands.
The city has seen this a thousand times before it will see it a thousand more. A city is not the walls nor the laws it is the people and the relationships they hold. It is they who will guide, they who will build, they who will prepare and plan for those to come and those already on the way. Will it be a community of open arms or one of hostility, of growth or destruction.
We are the spider.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
