I've got about an hour to crank something out, so let's do this. S took the boys to this Hindu mission thing they've started doing Sunday mornings. She's making a concerted effort to get them into more Indian activities, which is fine by me -- as long as I don't have to participate. Well, that's not exactly how it is. I don't mind doing a lot of the cultural things, in fact I enjoy them, but the Sunday mission is expressly Hindu, and I'm not really down with the whole religion thing.* I would go if S really wanted me to -- like if it was going to cause a rift in our marriage -- but she seems more to just prefer I go, not require me to go. I feel I can say no and not spend past my limit of emotional capital.
*I'm also not very spiritual. There are a few other non-Indian dads I know who go to the mission, and they tell me it's more spiritual than religious. S tells me this too. Personally, I have trouble drawing a distinction between the two. I've tried to get into things like this -- mindfulness and meditation and whatnot, and they just don't take for me.
And I really don't want to go. We only get so much free time in our lives to do the things we enjoy. Spending three to four hours every weekend to listen to fairy tales and pretend like they have some sort of deep meaning, just doesn't seem like an efficient use of my dwindling time on this mortal coil. I remember once, on an episode of Six Feet Under,* somebody was complaining that the mom's boyfriend, played by the actor James Cromwell (Ewan from Succession), didn't have to go to church, and he replied something to the effect of, "Yeah, that's the best part about being an atheist." I so identified with this line. (Although, I prefer the term "nonbeliever" to "atheist," but I don't get too bogged down in semantics.)
*Remember that show? Underrated gem from the twenty-aughts.
That said, it might surprise you to know that I'm actually pretty pro-Church/Temple because I'm very pro-community. Increasingly society is moving toward a place where nobody ever has to leave their house. Most people can work from home, shop from home, watch new movies from home, even date from home. There are fewer and fewer reasons to physically interact with other people. There are also more and more people struggling with mental health issues, and I would guess those two things are not independent of one another. So, I'm in favor of almost anything that promotes adult socialization. I really like the community building aspect of religion -- people physically coming together for a common cause. That really is a beautiful, increasingly rare thing in today's society. That's the part of religion I like. The parts I don't like are the dogma, the piety, the hierarchy, the bullshit. Basically I like religion, without any of the religion.
The challenge for us nonbelievers, then, is to find other ways to build community that don't involve religion. For most my life, this was automatic for me. I was in school until I was, like, 33, and I've always had a strong friend group outside of school. In my twenties and early thirties, there was always a crew around -- always somebody to watch a game with, always somebody to meet for brunch, always somebody to get a beer with. I could walk into a certain coffee shop or a certain bar and be instantly surround by people I know and like. I so took that for granted. And that stage ends. You have kids, everybody else has kids too, and suddenly you don't have time for all that other stuff and neither do they. Everything changes. The baristas and bartenders you knew get different jobs; your favorite establishments close; and, most of all, people move. That's the real killer. I'm still friends with almost all the people I was friends with twenty years ago. Unfortunately, I live in DC and they live in Seattle and LA and San Francisco and Hartford and New York and Blacksburg and Columbus and so on.
I definitely wish I had more close friends -- true homies -- who lived near me, but I think I'm doing okay building community. I just have to work at it a bit more than I used to. There are a few things I do to this end. The main thing is that I almost never turn down an invitation to a social event unless I have a scheduling conflict. A few weeks ago, for example, I went to my friends' Halloween party, even though S couldn't go, and I didn't have a good costume, and they live in a part of the city where street parking is nearly impossible to find. It would have been so easy to just bail and stay in for the night, but I forced myself to go. I threw on a lucha libre mask, drove to their neighborhood, paid $45 to park in a garage,* and had a great time.
*I justified it by telling myself it was cheaper than taking a Lyft/Uber there and back. This is true, but it was much, much more expensive than taking the Metro, which I also could have done. I justified that by telling myself that walking to and riding the Metro home late at night sucks, which is also true. In retrospect, what I should've done is taken the Metro there and ride-shared back. Maybe next year.
Other examples of things I try to do as much as possible: dad drinks, game nights, pub trivia, dinners with friends. I also will do the special Hindu events with the family if S wants to do them. We recently went to two Diwali events. One was at the mission and involved listening to traditional music and dancing in a circle. It was fine. Then we did Diwali dinner at some friends' house. That was actually really fun -- delicious Indian food and sparklers. (Diwali is the festival of lights.) In fact, it got a bit legit dangerous -- so many kids of different sizes holding burning sticks. It was outside on their lawn, and you could see big embers falling off the sparklers onto the foliage. Thankfully, it had recently rained, so everything was pretty damp. Nothing caught on fire and nobody lost an eye.
The last thing I will mention about community building is that being a member of the same gym for the past six or seven years has really helped. The mental health benefits are twofold: 1) You feel part of group, 2) You're motivated to exercise more. Recently, I thought about quitting my gym and finding a place that's more convenient. It's near my work, which made more sense when I was going into the office consistently three days a week. But since Covid, I've only been going in two days a week, at most, and so it makes a lot less sense. But I don't want to lose that sense of community -- I know everybody there, and they know me, and it's a really positive, rewarding environment. There's no guarantee I could replicate that somewhere else, and it would probably take a long time even if I could. So, I decided to just keep going with it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Alright gotta run -- by which I mean I'm literally going to go running. It's been beautiful here lately. If climate change is going to happen, might always take advantage of it.
Until next time...
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