Community Pool, Popsicles and Burundi
Does the pursuit of comfort separate us from the world?
While in other parts of the country September may signal the beginning of fall temperatures and colored leaves, September in Southern California is an intensification of summer, a final wave of scorchingly hot days and blazing blue skies. These days are our hottest of the year and the air is often hazy from wildfires. It is a stark departure from our typically mild coastal climate.
We sweat all day long. We sweat all night long. The kids sleep in underwear or diapers, leaving little damp ovals in the bed. The heat blankets us in a muggy haze, and the humidity dulls the colors and mutes the sounds. Everything seems to move more slowly, including us.
Our neighborhood is a funky assortment of townhomes in an amoeba shape around a large stretch of common greenspace and a community pool so old that it’s retro-cool again. Our homes are tiny and hardly any of us have air conditioning. We greet each other in the early hours of the morning, as dog-walkers and those with children take advantage of the slightly cooler morning temperatures. “Can you believe this heat?”, we all say. “Stay cool!” It is miserable, but as neighbors and friends, we are in it together. The heat drives us to the community areas like the beach, the pool and shady areas in the grass. It is fun to laugh and commiserate together. By afternoon, the pool fills with a sea of neighbors - babies bobbing in floaties, teenagers throwing footballs and the elderly gracefully navigating the crowd. It is reminiscent of an earlier era, one in which neighbors congregated on front porches and stoops and in communal places.
Without air-conditioning and large houses, we are forced out of our own sphere into each other’s company. In the discomfort, we find common ground and shared experience.
There is something so human about being in these earthly bodies that feel heat, discomfort and other sensations. It reminds us of our physical limitations and the beauty of being bound in our finite bodies.
While I bemoan a few hot days that many people experience regularly, my husband is overseas in the countryside of Burundi. The people he works with farm and live year-round in weather much hotter and muggier than this. A life of physical hardship.
We like to rationalize, reason and explain the circumstantial discrepancies between ourselves and our brothers and sisters around the world, allowing ourselves to feel more comfortable with it. But the truth is we are all souls born in a human body, into circumstances outside our control. And while our lives look very, very different, we are also the same - we all sweat, we all smell, and we all feel the heat.
While there is nothing wrong with being comfortable, the pursuit of comfort above all else keeps us separate from the world. Shared experience is diminished by our materially rich lives of comfort, yet shared experience remains an essential component of real community, a requirement for human happiness whether we acknowledge it or not. While I impatiently look forward to cooler days ahead, I hope the heat wave keeps me humble, remembering that I am but a small piece of a big world.