(I took my headphones out and
all I heard was other people’s headphones.)
If God put me on Earth for one reason, it was to learn about community. How people work, play and organise together has been my most intense and longstanding interest. My definition of community is refined by Elliot Sang who defined ‘network’ as the people you choose to hang out with, and ‘community’ as the people you don’t*. Your network is the people you invite to dinner, drinks, social occasions, because you want them there. Your community is people you stand next to at the bus stop. When I say some people ‘have no community’ I might mean that those people have no consistency in who they stand next to at a bus stop each day, who they see at their local supermarket, who they work with. Generally, capitalism messes with our lives in ways that make forming community difficult (such as leaving us with no consistency of leisure time), so that capitalism can sell us anything other than friendship to make us feel less alone.
For a long time, the bus was my key to a local community practice and my only way to get around. Like gardening, I would ride the bus between my house and the nearest town at least three times a week. For me, being around strangers in such a consistent environment was an opportunity to see social and political changes affecting people (including myself) in real time. Sometimes I would notice things I could help with, like someone not having enough bus fare, or dropping something without noticing. I stopped wearing my headphones, in a conscious effort to be more involved in being-with the other passengers. This involvement is something the older bus passengers generally do without trying, they notice things, and notice other people noticing things, then they speak to each other about the things they both see, and they make connections. I would often relay to friends and colleagues patterns I was noticing on the bus, as if it was a really interesting book I was reading and learning a lot from.
However, riding the bus without my headphones has become more difficult, harder, heavier. After protests in summer of 2025 took place outside a hotel** along my bus route, I found it difficult to relax when people boarded at the stop just outside of it. It was usually worse if no one got on, as this gave the other passengers freedom to make racist comments to each other based on what they’d seen in the local news. If people did get on outside the hotel, the air was tight as someone’s third-party-controlled bus pass failed to beep, single mums manoeuvred a second-hand buggy onto the bus without help, or a young man tried to move unseen, pushing himself deep into a seat at the back with his hood up. Where racism wasn’t spoken, the violent effects of its othering were excruciatingly loud.
Over the months of passenger-praxis, pain and poverty became more visible. A boy no older than 13, spits at the window of a bus driver who won’t let him on with a £10 note on the last bus home - a middle-aged couple, with expensive coats and haircuts, drunk on white wine, chastise me for offering to pay his £2 fare. I listen to the derogatory language young schoolboys in uniform use to talk about their female classmates, and watch them square up to a man who tells them to be quiet. I listen to countless hours of short-form videos of evangelical shouting or unseen violence, played at full volume. I see glassy eyed young men who refuse to sit with, or help, the young women they board with, who lift a pram, newborn and shopping from bus to street. I witness more than one drunk man who has wet himself be turned away from the bus, one is known to the bus driver who wrestles him away from the door, the driver in the bus behind shrugs and pulls away when we ask him to help.
I, like most people, try to live in line with my values. And where time is my most precious commodity, choosing where I spend that time is how I invest those values into things I care about. If I care about social justice, I’ve got to show up to the protest. If I care about my local artist friends being able to express themselves, I’ve got to attend their events. If I want public transport to exist, I need to ride the bus. And when the world is actively moving my impulses in the opposite direction, making me more tired, more isolated and more scared, I sometimes over-extend my energy. In classic over-achiever style, it’s not enough for me to just ‘show up’, it’s also about turning up and making sure absolutely everyone is having a good time and is well fed, watered, that they know where the toilets are and have a comrade to stand next to if they need it. I’m often spending my energy thinking about who’s not in the room, who should be, who might not feel safe, and how the next hypothetical event could be more inclusive.
Turns out, this isn’t very conducive to being present, authentic or useful. My insistence on ‘engaging’ sometimes makes me quite unwell and not nice to be around. This is made even worse when my frustration with myself gets turned onto other people: Why does that friend never attend protests? Why did no one else say anything? Why don’t more people show up to this community meeting? Why will no one help me quell my rage? My anger gets so big that it starts to weigh me down rather than pushing me forward - my energy is a burned up non-renewable.
So I stop getting the bus and start to ride my bike instead. Once a week, I begin to attend an LGBTQ+ group in a public building in the city. It is full of people who have wandered in for some coffee and colouring in time. I learn the joy of having superficial conversations about holidays and pets and family without holding my breath - I rest, without having to, at any moment, manoeuvre the conversation away from something hateful, combative or challenging. I start dipping back into religious settings. I stop forcing myself to do a big food shop on the weekend. I miss the protest. I miss the art event. I don’t go to the lecture that I suspect will make me angry.
I do not know if any of this is the right thing to do, and sometimes I suspect I’m shirking responsibility. But starving my anger gives me the quiet space to learn something. That beneath the rubble of my outrage, there is a deep well of my sorrow. Beyond my righteous anger, that tears me in all my different directions, I feel sad. I am sad about the bus and the protests and the health inequalities. I am sad about the lack of access to the things we need and how much we have forgotten about animals and land and how children feel and about screen time and adverts and landlords and the heavy weight of history and the empire and the wars and the wars and the wars and the people. And the people who were supposed to know each other. And the people who were supposed to look at each other with tears in their eyes and acknowledge how much was taken from them, to wordlessly sit with the body and to gather all their friends in mourning. To call each other back together again in seven days, not for a seance but because we need to remind each other to eat. And to gather again. And again in a year. I am so sad for the things I did not know I was waiting for. And I grieve.
“Could this be the path to a new sense of unity, the community of those who had known pain, and thence had found depth, so that creeds and traditions became but signposts to an acceptance of sadness and an entry into a depth where we found harmony with each other? Was this the way forward to a deeper unity with people of other religions or indeed of none? Perhaps we could start with the simple discovery that words divide and sadness unites.” (Robert Tod, 1989. Quaker Faith and Practice, fifth edition. 22.82.)
*Elliot Sang ‘Nowhere to Go: The Loss of Third Places’ (YouTube)
**The hotel was part of a Serco managed scheme that housed people temporarily while they were waiting for access to longer-term accommodation as part of the Home Office’s asylum process. It is no longer in use for this purpose.