Sharing

"Edinburgh ... you gotta share with the tourists." John pointed his plastic cup of beer at me. "But Glasgow. Now that's where you come to have fun!"

Everyone knows share and fun do not belong in the same experience. It has to be one or the other. At least introverts like me know that.

I thought I knew that. Now I'm not so sure.

Scotland has messed with my head.

The Basics

Babies are selfish critters. They are bawling and whining almost constantly for stuff they want ... strained bananas, a diaper change, etc. They couldn't care less about your day or your schedule. I try not to blame them for this - it is wired in their DNA, after all.

Kindergarten tries to correct this a bit by teaching sharing. Don't hoard the graham crackers. Don't monopolize the discussion. Let Olivia or Noah use the ... I dunno, the iPad? What are kids are required to share these days? sigh I'm so out of the loop.

At the risk of sounding trivial, sharing is a pretty cool concept. Maybe you can't afford that iPad yourself, but the group can ... so it opens up new experiences for you. But you're not going to use that iPad 24/7. So sharing let's you pass it to someone else for their turn. This is pretty basic right?

There are downsides too. If two people want to use it at the same time, you have to resort to some fair, conflict resolution strategy. This is not an easy task, and takes understanding and skill. It takes time ... a precious commodity you could have spent using an iPad if you had just had one of your own.

That's why when you get older, you opt out of sharing. In America, it's especially easy. If you are middle-class and make more money as you age, you spend more and more of your money to share less and less.

You start in a shared dorm room. You move up to a shared apartment building, shared hallways and outside doors. You move to a duplex, then a house in the suburbs and your own lawn. Each time you share less and less of the air with your neighbors. You purchase the right to play your music at full volume, I guess.

It is called "making your own way," and "the American Dream." The raucous American hymn 50 Miles of Elbow Room envisions its logical conclusion in heaven:

I identify with this sentiment. Or at least I did until I plopped down in Edinburgh.

Sharing a City

Edinburghers know how to share their space.

I don't think this is endemic to Edinburgh. In the Europe and the UK, you are really forced to share more. There is simply less space on this continent. If you want your own patch of land, you must be very, very, very rich.

Amy and I are living in what Americans would call a small apartment. It's maybe 800 square feet total, including the bathroom. It doesn't feel cramped, though. Its standard 14 foot high Georgian ceilings make a big difference. It's a fishbowl, but a tall fishbowl.

This sized apartment is where rich people live. The attached Georgian house next to us at 22 Ainslie Place is being sold for £1.2 million. That's $1.6 million dollars. Granted that's 4 floors of 800 square feet, but suffice it say it's no American mansion. There's no 3 car garage.

You share the air around you in a tangible way. It is the middle of a large city after all. There is traffic noise, sirens, slamming door sounds, laughs that are way too loud (this is Scotland!).

You share the grounds too. I have said "sorry" more times in the last 3 months than in my entire lifetime. It's because I have to share sidewalks and queues and buildings with more people than I ever have. I'm constantly running into people. But we all do.

You share transportation. Trains, trams and buses are the only way to travel any significant distance here in urban Scotland. Autos are hideously expensive, not just because they're UK-specific, but the licenses and parking are not purchasable by mere mortals. And even you got a parking permit, there's no assigned space. You may end up walking blocks to your flat, which defeats the purpose of having your own auto. And petrol? Try and find a station around here ... and even then, you'll have to sell your first born to fill the tank.

To an American, this might sound like hell. Not only is it not hell, it's actually surprisingly nice.

It helps that the shared places are those you'd want to share. Our Moray Feu neighborhood was built in the 1820's, and its stone buildings are gorgeous. I walk 20,000 steps every day, and my eyes are up most of the time. I catch new little details every day.

But the most important thing is the Scots want to share with you. They are used to it. It's not necessarily that they share everything with everybody (private gardens being a big exception to the sharing rule).

Sharing is a habit. And the more something is a habit, the less time you spend thinking about it, and the more time you spend doing it.

The Shared Experience

Amy and I met John at a Charlatans concert in Glasgow. He was friendly, just started talking to us while we were waiting for the concert to start. The Scots have a reputation for being friendly, and I find they live up to that. John is from Manchester, though, and picked up the ways of the Scots not through DNA but through learning, having spent the last 15 years in between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The Charlatans, though from Birmingham, were adopted by the 1990's Madchester scene, having a similar reliance on organ-drenched danceable rock. Madchester borrows heavily from 1960's hippie culture and psychedelia, ... a "peace and love" movement which seems arrive in Western culture every 30 years or so.

Naysayers see it as merely a drug swap - LSD for Ecstasy. I look at it in Scottish terms. It is a more practical, more mysterious, but less serious hippie culture. It's a movement that already know its limitations. They are not looking to change the world so much as be as become a temporary world.

You don't need Ecstasy, or any ingestible drug for that matter. Music is the stuff that bonds you with your neighbors. The Scots cannot sing, but that doesn't hold them back. They will sing any song they know the words to ... and those they don't know the words to as well.

So for us at that Charlatans gig, it was "The Only One I Know" and "Country Boy" and "Just When You're Thinking Things Over" and "So Oh" ... the hymns of our temporary church. There is no feeling like being in the middle of thousands of people, jumping up and down as one, sharing that little patch of ground in Glasgow.

You melt into the collective. And for a brief moment, you feel like yourself again.