In this twittering world...

It was one of those late-night discussions which started it off. What is a human resource? Is that what we all amount to, that and no more… just a person fulfilling a job description, whether in our workplaces or in how we’re defined to one another personally? It’s a phrase which has fascinated me for years, ‘human resource’. It’s one on which I’m torn. I like to feel useful, purposeful, so being definable as a resource when I go to work must imply that I am just that. Useful. Doing what I’m there to do. Playing a part in a drama, which both provides and fulfils a role in society – strutting and fretting my hour upon the stage. But then, a resource is by its nature disposable, replaceable. I’m not so keen on that one. I’d like to hope that what I do at work is that little bit different, unique even, and that although one I day I will leave or will retire, and be replaced, that I won’t be exactly disposed of. No: rather someone else will take my place, to do their own unique and different ‘thing’ as I shuffle off to the home for the bewildered, and then am heard no more… After all. As my favourite magnet among the many on my fridge proclaims: Remember – you are unique. Just like everybody else.

But maybe it’s more than that. I’m on holiday now. As I work as a teacher, I’m on holiday for ages: long enough to attract snide comments from friends in other lines of work, and even from the postman as he notices I’m at home during the day when he delivers yet another pile of bills. Does that mean I get to be a person for about 12 weeks each year – not just a human resource? I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, ever since that debate online, stretching after midnight as the term stretched wearily towards the end of June.

Are we all just definable as resources? Possibly. We all have our place in society and in one another’s lives. It provides an almost comforting stability, being like this, and it’s part of how society works. If we didn’t have people following their defined roles, anarchy would result; arguably if society opted to abandon these parameters, it wouldn’t be long before people would re-establish them, seeking the comfort of structure like a person drawing a cardigan about their shoulders on a surprisingly cold summer day. This is the kind of thing which makes me think about retirement with fear rather than eager anticipation. We define ourselves so much by what we do: teacher, lawyer, doctor, scientist… how rootless must it feel to cut yourself off from such a way of rationalising your place in the world, forever? To live the rest of your life in a sort of habitual past tense of the ‘used to’ auxiliary… Sometimes, in holiday times, I feel myself slipping into ‘teacher mode’. I want to tell off the unruly children in the swimming pool, or warn the fifteen year old that she needs a longer skirt and less fake tan, and shouldn’t be trying to get into that over-18 establishment. For the first week or two of the summer break, I twitch in anticipation of coffee at the time when the breaktime bell would normally ring, like a creature in a Pavlovian experiment which has been taken to extremes… even when the bell is no longer heard, the subject still anticipates it and reacts accordingly. And yet, strictly speaking, when I drive out through the school gates each day, each weekend and at the end of every term, I suppose I’ve earned the right to be ‘just me’ again. Not the human resource, the teacher me, the one who tells people off for undone top buttons and undone grammar, undone essays and overdone make-up. The ‘just me’ version… the personal pronoun bundle of personal qualities which I think make me ‘me’.

‘But there’s the rub.’ When I drive through the open gates of my school, when I reverse into the gateless driveway of my home, do I just become another human resource once again? Wife. Daughter. Neighbour. Not mother. I’m defined by all the things I am, and sometimes even more by what I’m not. We all define each other by what we are on paper. Age. Birthplace. Family background. Marital status. All that stuff. Once people discover I’m an only child, they roll their eyes subtly as if to say, ‘Ah, that explains it…’ People never really tell you what they think of you, unless you are retiring or have died, but I always think that eye-roll is expressing a feeling of disapprobation. I tend to be quite quiet and very independent – granted, probably a childhood immersed in books, music and the world of the imagination in a Troubles-ridden Belfast helped me along with this – and undoubtedly people think my lack of siblings can account for what I’m like. I’m defined in one way because of what age I am, and in another by how different people perceive this age and how I should be behaving or should appear. Should I be getting botox? Should I be having a mid life crisis? Should I, given my non-accomplishment of parenthood, be having a string of wildly unsuitable affairs and throwing caution and any sensible, teacher-like garments, to the winds…?

But maybe it’s more than simple assumptions about who we are – definitions by clothing label or by details on a passport. Maybe we define each other as human resources every bit as relentlessly as our employers do… and more so, too, because it’s done without a contract or a job description. Wife. Daughter. Neighbour. Friend. Acquaintance. The list could stretch on to the crack of doom… and looking at it, the word I’m thinking of is ‘confused’. The Facebook thing: ‘it’s complicated’. If I’m supposed to be all these things to all those many people, without a definition of exactly what I’m meant to do, then it’s perhaps unsurprising that I fall asleep so many nights considering myself a failure. Do we use each other as resources? Maybe. Certainly I know I measure what I’m like and how I relate to other people against the sort of inherited norms I’ve gleaned from… somewhere. From where, though? There’s no Google Map for pinpointing yourself in relation to somebody else – no default location, no route assistance, no street view to help you visualise how things should look from where you are. There’s no little red pin to stick in the life map to show you how negotiate the distances between you and everybody else: you just have to figure the right route out as you go along…

But does that mean we all just use each other? Maybe. That night on Twitter, several weeks ago, this notion bothered me. Somewhere deep beneath my professed front of cynical armoured plating, I must have a soft centre, because it kept me awake for several nights to think that people were all just using one another for who or what they were, or did, or might do, rather than simply engaging with one another because they liked each other, enjoyed one another’s company or conversation. At home, my husband keeps tropical fish. He calls them the Magnificent Seven, and has been known to talk to them. They show slight interest when I approach their tank, and tell them politely that they are jolly good chaps. When he appears, however, they go mad, swimming around, flicking their tails, performing a routine akin to a gold-medal-winning synchronised swimming team, only without the nose-clips and terrible make-up. He’s in denial if he thinks it’s because they like him better than they like me, though: it’s because the tall shape feeds them. Two different shapes appear beside the tank – the smaller shape is greeted by mild piscatorial apathy, the taller shape, fishy excitement beyond bounds. Maybe it’s the same with people – just more subtly so. We like the people who are nice to us, so we’re nice in return. We meet someone we think could be an advantageous person to know, so we’re nice to them in the hope of securing a mutual complicity of niceness. We can all define our degree of interrelation with each other in a gradation like a Dulux colour card, from the intense shades of family or marriage, through close friendship, friendship, friendly acquaintanceship, vague tolerance to the indiscriminate fade-to-blank of total strangers. Social networking puts the definitions on a different footing again, encouraging us to choose our best or favourite friends, or ‘tag’ people in terms of family ties or schools attended or even classes taken. The terminology evolves – the horror of Facebook lying in the terrible verb ‘unfriend’, or the quasi-stalkerish terminology of Twitter where your ‘friend’ turns into somebody who ‘follows’ you.

Friendship, to me, is based on trust. Knowing you can tell somebody things about yourself and trust them with this knowledge, or knowing you can tell them truths about themselves (whether good or bad) without ending the connection between you as violently as though it happened with a slammed-down phone. But then that’s another thing. Do we ever know each other? I’m not sure – and again, I used to think we could. Living means growth and growth means changing, and if we’re always changing then knowing someone becomes something of the past, unless you keep moving with the conjugating verb tenses of life. I can’t stand that cheap, cheesy saying about time: ‘Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present.’ It’s quite repulsively, nauseatingly trite and facile, and its easy internal rhyme scheme and play on polysemes just sum this up. It trivialises an essential line of thought, perhaps. If you are constantly changing, and so am I, and so is everyone, is there anyone or anything knowable, definable, static? I’m not sure. It becomes as difficult as keeping your balance when jumping off a moving bus onto a dizzying pavement… the stable ground is still there, but reaching it without falling over becomes a massive challenge. Maybe the solid ground between people becomes the facts we know about each other – the back stories, the anecdotes, the truths of deeply held beliefs or fears or insecurities. Maybe revealing more of these neatly stacked, card-indexed details makes us friends – even if it doesn’t mean we know how each of us will react in any future circumstance which we can only just imagine. It’s like jumping into moving water, or gazing at the waves breaking on a coastal shore… every drop of water is constantly moving, flowing, changing places, moving on. Maybe genuine friendship can be best defined as a complicity of shared knowledge and anaphoric reference of context and anecdote. You know each other’s darkness, each other’s secrets, you’ve seen behind the outward veneer and it’s fine: you still like one another, you can still make one another laugh or even smile at bad moments, you can still accept one another’s most negative points as well as sharing good things. That’s what happens in the best relationships I have, at least. There are far too many times when I’ve misjudged mere acquaintanceship as friendship, only to be hurt when my trust has been betrayed, my secrets told or ridiculed, reliance or support removed when things on either side (or both) get difficult.

I’ve been rereading ‘Four Quartets’ by TS Eliot this afternoon. I loved Eliot’s poetry at university, and still do, but I think with time I understand it better now than I did then – ironically enough in the case of ‘Four Quartets’, given what Eliot says there about time. I’m thinking a lot about time, and change, and knowing things. The past – the present – the future. The past is seconds ago, thinking about this final paragraph, but also the vastness of an ocean of infinities of seconds and minutes leading into days and unfathomable wastes of years. The present is gone as I type each word. The future? You’re reading this in the future, while I’m typing it in a present which has slipped away to the waters of the past in the moments in between. We’re changing – all of us – always. The world is turning imperceptibly but inexorably under our feet. Time is moving. We are drifting with time like the victims on a shipwreck, through the waves. Maybe the best thing we can do, in ‘this twittering world’ of blackbirds in a rainy garden or tweeters in a rainy summer, is hold on to the best, and strongest, and most trustworthy human resources we can find.

In an indifferent world of unreliable song, maybe that’s greatest comfort we’re going to find.