On Context

At the end of our trip in January, my brother Sam booked us a single night at a spa hotel in a tiny town in the French Alps. We schvitzted in the sauna, worked up an appetite and then wandered to the only restaurant nearby, a glowing neon sign in the otherwise pitch back road. Inside, it was warm and collegial. Every new customer would enter, and before sitting, circulate all the tables, exchanging bon-nuits and little parcels of small talk¹. As the only foreigners, we attracted the interest of the middle aged couple sitting next to us. When dessert came, they ordered us a digestif and then a couple more² and we got to talking.

Jeremy, the husband, had lived in the village his whole life. In fact, seven generations of his family had lived in the village; his adult son walked in later, suggesting that they were keeping that ball rolling. Jeremy knew all about the history of the area, and was eager to talk about WWII³ and the way the genepi we were drinking was produced from mountain flowers and had been since at least the 1800s.

In New York, most of my friends are transplants. Many people seek out New York in order to sever themselves from personal or provincial histories. This is not to say that New York itself is devoid of history and doesn't leave its own imprint - but that many people arrive with the express intent of making their own stories. New York, as a city of maximum possibility, accommodates all these imaginations. There are avant-garde clowning programs and flag football leagues and people who belong to both. These communities may not be as durable as history, but they are equally meaning makers, ways of building context or, what my friend Lisa calls 'a place where when you don't go, you're missed.'

Context means to weave together. To be contextualized, is to be woven into people, place, and history. Our natural surroundings can contextualize us deeply. In Seattle, the parking signs use cardinal rather than positional directions - the mountain and the water are unmistakable landmarks. A garden contextualizes us in a way that a windowless casino is designed not to, inviting us into the rhythms of sunlight, seasonality, and at least in my apartment, the slow but inevitable decay of my fiddle leaf fig. ⁴

Regardless of where context comes from, it grounds us. Context, in my mind, is the opposite of self absorption, because it places our meaning markers in the world. This is "inconvenience is the price of community" discourse: to become part of a community means to anchor on others in a way that gives up a part of the self. To go camping is to surrender the creature's comforts of control for a sense of belonging in the natural world. For Jeremy, family history eclipses his own individual story. There's a comfort and a security in each of these self-negations. You exist beyond yourself.

Of course, it's not strictly positive. Being powerfully embedded in a community, or a place, or history also means less freedom for self-definition. I went to the same high school as my oldest brother. My sophomore year, four out of six teachers had taught him previously and all four inadvertently called me by his name at least once. It was almost all to my advantage since he was an academic weapon, but I was self-conscious about being known in relation to someone rather than on my own terms.

The other angle is that sometimes our context may just be plain wrong, bending us in ways we're not supposed to go. To be at odds with context is exhausting: it means swimming upstream against powerful currents and feeling a constant tension between self and surroundings. This can manifest in small frustrations (like when we take my highly spice intolerant friend Jeremy (separate from Jéremy) to Indian restaurants) but also deep alienation (like when we mislead friend Jeremy about how spicy the curry is).

Still, being contextualized is better than to be contextless. Context gives us the opportunity to extend beyond ourselves into a deep union with the world. At its best, context lets us feel embedded and placed.