Her life in a shopping cart

All day I have been thinking about the intersections between unhoused people and Roma people, and in the midst of my thinking, I passed this woman on my One Street, strolling along talking to herself in some agitation, with apparently all her worldly possessions in a red shopping cart. Your comments on my last two blips have been rich and fascinating and stimulating. You have helped me to think this through, and you’ve suggested several books and a film I can hardly wait to devour.

We conventionally-housed people, with our safety and our credit cards and our bills to pay, have sometimes convoluted feelings about those who don’t follow our ways. I don’t think we’re all like sheep, and I wouldn’t call us bourgeois just because we live in houses or flats of some kind, but when Malvina Reynolds wrote “Little Boxes”  she hit a nerve.

It takes courage and imagination to create a way of life that suits us and is outside the “norm” where we come from, and some people are born into circumstances in which choice is an impossible dream. Yet I can think of a dozen Blippers I’ve followed for these three years running who have created unusual ways of life and who live in financial circumstances that are tight, tenuous, and sometimes downright frightening. It comes across in our journals over the years, even though we try not to talk about it too much. We have dared to be unconventional or are forced to be unconventional by our unique character; we carve out some kind of living in which we are our own boss, or we practice an art we love that doesn’t pay very much, or we live in service to others, in conditions some find precarious, risky, or adventurous. We pay the price for that, and if we have children they also pay the price, and sometimes the price is very steep. A few make a good living doing something they love; more power to them.

But the mass of people, as Thoreau said, “lead lives of quiet desperation.” Maybe they became parents before they figured out how to live outside the norm, and they felt they couldn't do that to their children. They go to work, often in cubicles or in soul-sucking offices, they have a mortgage, they send their kids to college, they pay their bills, and they have longings. One day they might feel self-righteous about their hard work and responsibility; another day they might feel worn down by the hours it takes them and by the disappointments of their success.

Some of us ask ourselves if we’ve done the whole thing wrong, if we took the wrong turning, if we made some terrible mistake, married (or divorced) the wrong person, pursued the wrong career; ask ourselves if there was some crossroad where we should have taken a different direction. And whether it's too late to change direction now.

We look up and see “others”--unhoused people, Tinkers, Travellers, artists, “bohemians,” Roma: with whom we would probably not trade places, whose very existence tweaks those questions in us. We are the same in asking that terrifying question--if we have done the whole thing wrong--but we are also different. So when we look at people who are beyond merely unconventional, their lives inspire mixtures of pity, envy, attraction, repulsion, respect, and fear. The whole seething mulch of human emotion. Some days we feel deep compassion and admiration. Some days we have a feeling of connection, “That could so easily be me.” Some days we might think, “At least I have not come to that!” Some days we might shiver with repulsion. Some might even like to sweep the “other” off the face of the earth.

We think about each other and wonder what it would be like to be in that life over there. Don’t we all do that? I do. This website allows us to peer into each other’s lives, to learn about each other; it also allows us to share pictures of others--family, friends, people we love; or sometimes “strangers,” whose lives we think about. We go on discovering who we are in the world, how to be in “right relationship” with others, and where we fit. Well, that's what I do.