Random thoughts

It's been a week since I last posted here!? Time does fly... it does indeed... I've been really busy with lots of things over the last week. The mission's now complete.

I had a chance to visit Edinburgh. If you haven't been there, you MUST. It's a city that deserves to be a world heritage. No doubt about that. It's so pretty.

I also had a few meetings and am now trying to organise what I heard from them in my head. Since I got here I've been reading papers to gather key issues that seem to be relevant to my research. Also trying to picture this great city with tremendous diversity in terms of race, religion, faith, political view, and types of people.

Things I've seen this time make me rethink the city. I wasn't that into the make-up, history, functions, and roles of the city before. However, it appears that the city is like a gigantic piece of magnet that brings people from all over the globe as it literally does. Sweating over small matters is a waste of time here. There're of course pros and cons about all this because it strengths can immediately be its weaknesses if something goes wrong. I'm just amazed that the city still functions more or less okay.

It can be really hard and makes you a tough guy to actually live here, because you can just be one of those people who surround you. As of now, I think that's why people seek to be recognised by belonging to groups, associations, and so forth which the city has to offer. You could be left alone if you didn't belong to anything, but you can find something that appeals to you if you just look around. By belonging to it, you gain recognition and self-esteem. Lots of people seem to do that. Of course there're individuals that prefer/choose to be free. Yet whenever I ask practitioners of community organising, I get puzzled as they don't focus on the individual. They tend to say if people don't have/find anything that suits their interest, they should form groups. Thus, groups tend to be specific in terms of faith, religion, interest, political view, and so on.

There're numerous opportunities for belonging here. It's a rather different context. It's interesting. I'll spend some time to jot down what I've found... this long weekend is going to be spent for this.

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