Can holidays account for having thoughts on community building? Maybe. How?
Let's find out then.
This time it might include certain personal opinions, so bear with me.
Recently I took a trip, and it was surely a trip to remember. It was around the beaches, beautiful waves, lots of sunshine - so much so - that it could fill up one month's load of Vitamin D exposure. Anyway jokes aside, it was quite necessary from the constant pressure of working and isolating oneself in the buzz of invisible races.
What I found there was truly refreshing and intriguing, something related to fictive (imaginary or induced through friendships) kinship and development of accidental bonds. It is true that women still feel unsafe when they are traveling anywhere without the presence of any men or their uncalled for "protectors"! But if you develop a sisterhood of traveling holiday-mates, things might actually work for a change. Developing groups with stranger women on holidays and exchanging emotions or experiences works out a lot, in this Era of consistent alienation. ( thanks to that one woman who gave me the idea of talking about alienation and friendships, just before I started writing the article). This not only helps in increasing group strength, accountability, "safe houses" in unknown places and good means of spending time on your holidays.
We were fortunate enough to meet such women and actually our friendship was helped by the time, our personalities and the obvious structure of the place where we stayed (that's the more interesting part)! Digging right into it.
The fact that horizontal places have much more options open for communication with neighbors than vertical alignments of hotel spaces gives it a great edge over maintaining interactions and approaching rooms rather quickly. I am well aware of personal space and personal leisure time which needs to be enjoyed by ourselves- but it's something more than that. It is how you are structuring your environment and how you are allowing accessibility to people. The very idea of making spaces which would allow for interactions, community activities, communal eating and a continuity in connections - was the agenda of doing away with the feeling of alienation or an isolated essence which could increase issues of safety or vulnerability in an unknown environment. Representing the structure in the following picture provided in this essay- ofcourse the STAR of the article. (Again not promoting any place)
So as you can notice, the constant array of horizontal singular rooms put after one another and with proper spacing gives a fundamental feeling of community living (something which my Mother generated an idea about, can't be thankful enough to her for that). This emphasis on the playful, creative and collaborative living under a community-knit association was inspired by the theories of Tonnies, further illustrated and engaged with by Georg Simmel on how these sociable human connections gives pleasures of physical proximity and enhances ones empathy. The ideas of shared housing and community kitchens which became famous during the 1970s also emphasizes the usage of shared spaces in order to mark a sort of integrity and bonding among women, who could share each other's stories and become aware of their lived experiences.
These ideas of creative gemeinshaft (community) could possibly bring in a new form of association and collaboration between individuals to do away with hierarchical strictures on physical structures which doesn't always have to touch the sky in order to prove that they are mightier than the other. These less spaced clingier high rises could alter themselves into well spaced, yet close knit horizontal living spaces. These spaces helps in maintaining the social nature of humans, as well as it ensures the doing away with superficial connections/ roots of alienation.
All these experiences were summed up with just one holiday trip where I learnt a lot, experienced a thousand different emotions, unfortunately got collectively cat-called (welcome to the real world) but made some serious good friends. Dedicated to such a friendship.
P.S. FORGOT TO MENTION, MEN WON'T BOTHER IF THEY CAN SEE A SILHOUETTE OR A REAL WOMAN- EVERYTHING IS A MATTER OF THEM TAKING CHANCES TO PROVE HOW FRAGILE THEIR EGOS ARE.
Talking about egos, the sea and the sun both have them - as I felt the rage of the sea which would be shown down below through some pictures you might enjoy looking at, as well as the rage of the sun Because of which I got brutally grilled.
Cheers for reading till this far. Hope you all have a good day!
Enjoy the next few souvenirs!
I had to pause for a few moments because this made me look back on my college years from 1000 years ago!!😉 During my freshman year in university, I was assigned to the small-ish, one story student housing unit (in the shape of am "L." All the other campus housing were either 3-winged or apartment style and 3 stories high. I lived there for 2 years and then moved to one of the apartment style units for my last 2 years. It REALLY was so much more communal and collaborative in the horizontal housing. We decorated inside the halls and outside every month and had movie night every Saturday night (we brought blankets and microwave popcorn for movie marathons). It's…
Wow! 💙