part ii: in trust we trust
On why trust deepens our experience of home.
Home. Here is a word that is etched deep within the hearts of many. Many take for granted that it is something that we are born in possession of. That it is given. Perhaps they do not know what it is like to dream of a state that is intangible, and that is what home is, a state, but not in the sense of whole countries and the institutions that govern them. Still, is home a state of being, that sense of being settled in oneself that we carry with us no matter where we happen to be situated? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Is it the people we encounter, but then what happens when we cannot take them or the places we love with us? Home is as much about familiarity as it is about fear. Fear of uncertainty and the desire to control our circumstances. About the things we take for granted, and those we discard. Familiarity provides the illusion of certainty and security. It is seductive and lulls one into a sense of comfort. Perhaps this is what home is: security, predictability, and certainty. It is rhythmic and one can anticipate its beats and notes and crescendos. It is synchronicity, like an orchestra or trees dancing in the wind, each branch and leaf swaying to the promise of another tomorrow.
This rhythm has feet that are firmly planted in the ground. It can withstand any tumultuous event even when some leaves are pruned from its branches. Such events strengthen one’s body and sense of place, but that place is not merely a geographic reality. It is desire and whenever one desires to be secure, she is desirous of home. People, places, hopes and dreams and their capacity to be fulfilled all provide a measure of security. One finds fulfillment in others only insofar as one can trust that they, too, are predictable. Here, no large surprises are welcome as all parties dance to the same anticipatory gaze, each expectant that the other will not change so drastically as to leave the other behind. Trust, in its socio-biologically mandated form, that is, as an objective reality that structures our lives independent of individuals’ subjective experience of it, facilitates one’s capacity to make a home out of the intangible.
Expectation is intangible for what one expects is never granted. Yet we expect many things of the people we encounter. A certain degree of neighbourliness puts restless and searching hearts at ease. Expectation, searching and yearning form the machinery of home-making. They are the ingredients through which one identifies with and tastes the promise that one will be comforted and consoled based on shared interests and desires. But home does not require mutual interests aside for those most basic and higher order values, namely self-preservation. To the extent that one feels that they can peaceably participate in social life and embody their self-understanding, thereby cultivating an identity and mode of moving through the world that is not threatened by others, then they will have achieved and realised one dimension of home: self-assurance. However, that assurance is always already conditioned by the exterior world and machinations of trust as an objective reality. Here, one trusts or at least hopes that a trust-based society disallows behaviours that undermine individuals’ diverse modes of embodying their self-understandings.
While individuals’ behavioural toleration of the Other (i.e. we are always already Other) is not complete acceptance, the prosocial behaviours that are sanctioned by a trust-based society cultivate basic expectations regarding how individuals ought to treat one another irrespective of their individual attitudes. To breathe as opposed to holding one’s breath. Still, toleration performs a disciplinary function that disciplines individuals into making themselves emissaries of trust who promise to themselves and others that they will not act in ways that jeopardise others’ sense of security. It is only when people refuse to assimilate trust into their interior life that we witness the subjectivisation of trust and its reduction to a transaction (e.g. I will care about your wellbeing only if you exhibit qualities I value and desire). The placement of conditionalities on other people as potential recipients and beneficiaries of our trust is all too common in today’s world and it militates against individuals’ capacity to extend their compassion beyond narrow circles and imagined communities. It militates against our ability to establish sound and non-oppositional self-understandings that privilege what one is not is not as opposed to what one is.
Our incapacity to prioritise broad identities in lieu of narrowly defined self-conceptions undermines our ability to imagine home in broad-based terms that recognise the universality of the human desire to be secure and safe. When home is partly reducible to the people one encounters, then one must strive to recognise and/or discover home in each encounter because security and safety are universal desires and pursuits. Seeing oneself as always already in community with the people one encounters allows one to cultivate an identity that is not always in need of safeguarding because one need not understand it as being under threat. This holds because a truly embodied self-understanding cannot wither when even one person is adorned in its splendours. No matter the measure of assaults one perceives themselves and their imagined and actual communities to be faced with, cultures, persons, and whole societies continue to live and breathe irrespective of the extent to which others may seek to erode particular identities, cultures and communities.
Many of us seek but fail to find security in the other and ourselves and by virtue of this. Still, recognising our own otherness creates the conditions of possibility for us to recognise ourselves in the other. Bridging our own perspective and extending our grasp and reach to the other fosters mutual recognition which, at the end of the day, is what many of us seek. To be validated as subjects in our own right and not merely as means to other people’s ends, but as ends in ourselves, is something we all desire. We want the other to touch us and experience our tangibility, that is, our concreteness. To see ourselves, including our aspirations, reflected in the eyes of the other, including in the most unexpected and surprising of ways. There is a degree of whimsy to encounter, like a mating dance that may or may not result in the consummation, platonic or otherwise, of the relationship. This consummation is not only with the other but with oneself as both recognise themselves in each other while recognising the other in themselves. Failing this, our hearts are restless until they rest in the other, finding community wherever one may turn.
Attitudinal discrepancies need not curb our capacity to find mutual recognition with the other, unless one stubbornly clings to narrow self-understandings even while subjecting themselves to the discipline of the principle of trust as an objective and assimilable reality that individuals may or may not fail to internalise. The determination of an enduring sense of self, one that is stable and secure can only occur through individuals’ recognition of their shared otherness and through encounter with the other. Identity is anticipatory. Our efforts at self-definition always already anticipate the other as we are always searching for ourselves therein, whether in narrow or in broad terms. We find our fulfillment, our end, in the other as we engage in mutual acts of self-sacrifice at each other’s altars. Footsteps align on the tarmac as bodies synchronise to the rhythm of birds echoing the dawn of yesterday, singing brother, sister, I see you. I love you, therefore, I must love myself. Here and now, in you, with you, and through you: I am. I am home and here, I will stay.
***
As it were, the wind has ceased billowing after nights of unrest. Homes shattered and roads flooded making previously habitable places, houses, inhabitable or, at the very least, precarious. Souls scramble to be assured that they are sufficiently insured to rebuild the homes they hold dear. Some lack insurance (it is out of reach) but then again, what does it mean to insure one’s home and to have assurance that one will not be stripped bare, homeless? The physicality of housing oneself and adorning oneself with the markers of a place and shelters of brick and mortar is always fundamentally precarious. Here and there one is beholden to nature’s rent-seeking through natural disasters and the monetary demands of landlords readily reminding others that they are sheltering themselves on borrowed time. Streets are lined with soles entrapped in the logics of imagined scarcity which has been manufactured by the few at the expense of the many who are left with little choice but to succumb to the disciplinary hand of a world that is not at home with itself. A world that is unrecognisable to itself and those who seek shelter within it. A world that is increasingly uninhabitable due to the choices and hubris of some.
What does it mean to be of a place when planting one’s roots comes at a cost one cannot afford? To be always already displaced because being emplaced in the world is expensive beyond comprehension. Displacement while obviously associated with the vagaries of war, is inscribed in the rhythms of a world in which life itself is monetised. This hustle and the next are never enough to provide assurance that one will be secure and safe and sheltered in the places one would call ‘home’. Still, houses of stone and concrete are erected with the promise of permanency, yet this is an illusion that is maintained through collective self-mutilation. Illusions are the bread and butter of a world that has run amok leaving behind its inhabitants; a world that resists our efforts to assert our ownership over it because we have made it that way, forgetting, always forgetting that it cannot be owned.
This is why a stable and secure sense of self realised through mutual recognition with the other and rooted in the socio-biologically mandated observation of trust-based relationships, must underpin any effort to make a home out of a place, lest narrow interests prevail that seek to discipline the world into the dictates of self-interest. When power and its exercise foreground the terrain of placemaking across a multitude of geographies, calls for equity are but one strategy in subverting the will of the few, whereas a more enduring strategy may be the enactment, practice, and socialisation of ‘ubuntu’ and its invitation to recognise that we exist through and by virtue of the other. Mutual recognition of our collective desire for security within ourselves, through and with the other, and in place, may curb the sense of alienation we collectively experience at all times, try though we may to mask it. And so, the pendulum swings through the annals of history.
***
Home. As elusive as it is desired. Perhaps none can hope to truly find it. So much of our lives militates against our capacity and desire to find it, yet we have always already discovered it. Each time we look into the eyes of the other, we are looking into ourselves because we are always already the other, strangers and familiars moving towards the horizon etched on our intertwined hands. Our walk with the other begins from the moment we are conceived and is actualised the moment we are birthed into the world. Although some may wish for it, we cannot possibly live or make sense of ourselves independent of the other. Home is always already here and there, and we need only open our eyes and hearts to the call of a broadly conceived Other lest partial sympathies and partial truths engulf and displace us all. And so the trees stand still having weathered another storm. They are reminders that we, too, can emerge through the storms of a dispossessing world, confidently exclaiming that through the other, we are found and here, we are never truly lost, but can always, always find our way home.