Coming back to the old neighbourhoods

One of the houses I grew up in as a kid in what is now called “Midtown” Toronto, but was known as Chaplain Estates back in my day, named for the farmer who sold the land for houses at the edge of Toronto back in the early 1900s.

On the road again, and this year is starting to feel like my pre-pandemic travel schedule, one that I thought I might try to cut back on. Not happening though! The trade-off for not being at home much is I get to work with with old friends here in Toronto, Ben Wolfe and Violetta Ilkiw. We just finished a three day Art of Hosting with an interesting group of people including a team involved in creating a Poverty Truth Commission in Mississauga, Ontario, some congregational leaders, restorative justice practitioners, community organizers and educators. A real delight.

Today I find myself wandering the neighbourhood where I grew up in Toronto, past houses in which I was raised, places I played as a child and homes where I spent time with my friends. Every so often, when I am visiting the city, I come back and sometimes just hang out in the spaces, letting the time spirits wash over me, trying to remember names and events, always being surprised by some long forgotten memory that will come back. Fifty-six years doesn’t seem like a long time, but being back in these neighbourhoods finds my mind drifting to the oldest stories this body carries. It must be a little odd to see a middle aged man slowly walking these streets, pausing to sense something, and recover something. I don’t know why I do it but there is a part of me that always belongs to this neighbourhood despite how much it has changed. Maybe we need these experiences of rootedness as humans, especially if we come from a people that never stop moving on to the next place, seeking settlement and leaving parts of ourselves behind. I have spent my life in two countries, nine towns, cities and villages, and something like 20 homes. Something in me misses a deeper integration of my life’s stories. Revisiting these old places brings a bit that into play.

Since the mid nineties one of the homes I have also lived in is the online world and ever since I signed up for my first email address at the National Capital Freenet in 1992, I have posted, discussed, argued, published and mused on the net. I’ve been in all the big social media places and seen them grow into places of incredible connection and generosity and then seen each one fall into enshittification, dominated by the needs to satiate the rapacious appetites of the venture capitalists that demand astronomical returns on their investment. Before long, all of that connection and community gets co-opted and used to train algorithms that activate the stickier parts of your brain. The brain I have is particularly susceptible to these machinations, and so it’s a big deal when I can pry myself away from these places. I think I’ve almost done it.

I have abandoned Twitter after something like 17 years, and my Facebook and LinkedIn use is just limited to sharing blog posts from here and some occasional check-ins with the global Art of Hosting pages. I opened an account on Bluesky because I am deeply involved in Canadian soccer and that is where folks meet. Bluesky is that place for now, but I have no doubt it too will go the way of all the others, and like a cloud of moths, the community will find another home.

But I have returned to blogging more often, you might have noticed, and I use my Mastodon account to post links and engage in some conversation with a small group of people. It’s more of a memory hole than an attempt to gain influence in the online world. Mastodon is structurally different from all the other networks, and it is protected from the kinds of inevitable arcs that will face each new attempt to recreate twitter or Facebook. It also brings the brain less frenetic energy. It is truly a microblogging space, and it helps to think of it that way. A blog and an RSS feed combined into one. I never see anything there I didn’t ask for.

I’m not even going to post link to my social media accounts, because you don’t really need to go there. Anything of substance I have to say, remember, reflect upon, or share I do here at my blog. A few hundred of you subscribe by email and others check in from time to time and I appreciate the connections we make and the conversations and observations that flow here. You will never be served an ad from this site and I only accidentally stumble across the numbers that Jetpack reminds of. This place is not here to harvest things about you: It is a place to harvest things about me out in the open. It is a place of open curiosity and open source learning, and half polished drafts of possibly useful ideas. Glad you’re here too.

It does feel very much like coming back to the old neighbourhood.