Where Are You?

Coordinates for Sanity.

I am in my kitchen in the Cotswolds, in England.

It’s evening. The fire it lit. Zero degrees outside. No sound. No stars.

A long time ago, and many miles away, in the town where I was born, two men walked the streets during the day, and talked long into the night. Manchester. The engine of the Industrial Revolution. Some people called it Cottonopolis. The people who lived there called it the Golden Sewer. So much wealth. So much human misery. 12 hour factory days 6 days a week. Life expectancy around 30years old.

One of the men was a manager at his father’s factory - Ermen and Engels - the other was permanently hard-up economist and political philosopher.

In 1848, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. They were wrong about the future - but so are most of us - economists, politicians, and philosophers, especially. The borderless, community-based utopias Marx and Engels believed in, are as far away as ever. Capitalism hasn’t collapsed. Communism as it exists in the world is a terrible failure. And although the mighty power of AI systems could indeed relieve humans of bullshit jobs and create abundance for all, those in charge of AI right now are not looking for utopias - except for themselves and their friends, safely stowed away on a wi-fi enabled Noah’s Ark, while the planet burns.

Marx did predict the future spookily enough though, when he talked about industrial capitalism as marked by ‘acceleration’ and ‘disruption’.

Both words are the buzzwords of now. We have never gone faster, or with more churn, and the new US Presidency is about nothing else. Tariffs happen in the morning and are cancelled by lunchtime. Greenland is being annexed, or maybe it’s Canada, or it’s Gaza-a Lago, and the rush to fire half of the population while deporting the rest, (Ok exaggeration) is just starting.

That’s why I am asking Where Are you?

Are you reading this at home? Is it Ok? Do you wish you could be somewhere else?

Do you feel safe and settled? Restless? Are you travelling? Are you transient? If you had to leave, have you got a couple of books in your grab-bag? A notebook? Pens?

When I was a young woman I lived in all kinds of temporary places. I left home at 16, because I had fallen in love with a young woman, and that was unacceptable in my religious household. I had to give her up or go.

Well, what would you do?

I lived in a tent, with a teacher, in the back of my Mini, on various floors, in staff accommodation in a psychiatric hospital where I worked for a year, before going to study at the university of Oxford. I didn’t have much stuff, but I had a beautiful Persian prayer rug that became my roll-out world. Once that was on floor, and a few books beside me, I was fine. I was fine because to have stayed in the semi-comfortable space called ‘home’ would have cost me my soul and my self.

That’s too high a price to pay.

Where Are You?

There’s so much rubbish talked what happens when you have to get away, have to get free, and the likelihood is that it won’t feel wonderful, or liberating, or even sane, at first. You reach the border of commonsense. Everything tells you to turn back. You jump. Then it’s hard, it’s scary, it’s full of self-doubt. All I know is that sticking with the decision you made is harder than making it. It’s why battered women return to abusive men. And when there is a level of comfort in the situation you long to leave, it’s even harder than when there is none.

Where are you emotionally? Where are you spiritually? These questions matter as much as where are you financially, where are you in your career, where are you in the eyes of the world. What I learned as a young woman was that everything on the outside could be taken away, or would have to be given up. And that deep inner voice sounds crazy. How can you explain it to others? That it’s some sense of being throttled, or suffocated, or living too little, which is not the same as thinking you can have it all. We are often too careful, even in our selfish loves. We are afraid of we what we will lose, even when we know that by staying put, it is ourselves we will lose.

In our world nothing feels safe anymore. And weirdly, perhaps, that unsettlement gives us the impetus and the strength to ask if we are in the right place. That could be geographically, it could be at work, it could be the things we have been putting off, waiting for a better time. You will know what it is for you.

The world is always changing - sure, that’s life. Where we are now is not life. It’s a world run by a bunch of men in a death-cult. War. Planetary breakdown. Mass migration and displacement. Religious fanatics, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, doesn’t matter which sky-god, if the outcome is the same.

Individual awareness of ourselves has never been more important. This is no time for automatic pilot or cruise control. We are not in a Musk-mad self-driving car.

Where we are asks questions of ourselves and it also asks questions about our communities. Where we belong. What alliances we can build. How can we help? Do we know our neighbours? Have we strong, like-minded friends? Can we get involved in action that refuses hatred, cruelty, sneering, misinformation, selfishness?

Knowing yourself is not selfish. It is the beginning of action. Where am I is also Where do I stand? What do I stand for? What will I stand up for?

Where are you starts with your inner coordinates. That’s what will direct you and guide you. And they are not - or need not- be at the whim of the madmen and their death-cults. We are not at war, yet. We are not living under martial law, yet. Or under some version of the Taliban - thanks for that snapshot of the future in Gilead, Margaret Atwood, and JD Vance even grew the beard. Life imitating art once again.

So while we are free, we need to live free. To ask where we are, and what we can do about it, and always, every time, to ask how we can help others.

It’s not charity, it’s compassion. It’s not charity, it’s connection.

And, you know, the world’s first Trades Union movement came out of Manchester, because those workers said Enough Already. And the Women’s Social and Political Union, the suffragists, came out of Manchester. Pankhursts for all. And the British anti-slavery movement started there, the workers refusing to process slave-grown cotton. And Britain’s first public lending library… for working people, for knowledge, for power.

Modern life has successfully atomised many of us. Made us feel alone. Powerless. But we are not. Change begins with looking up, looking around, and asking a simple question

Where Am I ? In all this?