The Peripheries Issue

Volume 8 Issue 3, October 2008

The extent of our involvement with different groups plays an enormous role in defining both to ourselves and to others who it is that we are. Communities of shared heritage, shared interest, shared address, or shared circumstance form and collapse constantly throughout our lives, and as they take and loseWeight Exercise shape we face daily questions about the membership of our personal, familial, and national identities.

What is it about a certain group that brings us together – what do we think that we have in common with those who are in the group, what do we think that is different about those who are not? How strongly drawn to the ideals and activities of a certain group do we feel, have we felt, will we feel? If a disagreement were to arise, would we find ourselves thrust coldly to the periphery of our social circle – or find ourselves at the core of a new one? Inevitably, those with whom we share the characteristics and values that we prize end up becoming more familiar to us, more well-liked by us, and more comfortable for us to be around. This quite natural process, the process of spreading our arms wide to embrace those at the centre of our social, spiritual, or political worlds, has the unfortunate side effect of causing us to turn our backs towards those on the outside of the circle. We must always take care to look away from comfortable definitions and usual company, or we will never take advantage of the new expressions, new opinions, and new ideas that unfamiliar voices always bring.

How we define the peripheries of our communities – and who we imagine as existing outside of our worlds, inside those peripheries – says as much about us as it does about them. The way we treat those who are different from “us” tells “them” more about who we really are than we could ever try to say in words, and everyone – on the insides and on the outsides – is profoundly affected by those choices. The power to include or exclude is within all of our hands, and so we do have the ability to send people away to the periphery of our thoughts and of our societies. However, there is no such thing as being alone in this life – there are too many circles, too many groups, too many edges to walk along to not eventually (and quite accidentally) wander into the centre of a life that you can truly call home.

Never forget that we are all on our own journey from someone’s old life to someone’s new place in the world, no matter how far away that place of comfort is from where that old life was or where someone else thinks we should live. Our own path home grows longer every time we create a new periphery to avoid.

Mark Ciesluk
Editor-in-Chief