Slow learner

I thank Arts Council Malta and the Maltese Presidency of EU for enabling me to spend seven weeks in Brussels, a city I would perhaps never visit otherwise. Slow travel, spending more than a week or two in one place, allows a different perspective to emerge. I am learning a lot about myself, about being a Maltese citizen, about the European Union and about Brussels.

This is my third week as a citizen journalist and I've just returned from a weekend in Malta where I voted for the first time in a National election. Brussels felt familiar when I got off the plane and took the train to Central. The ticket machine conned me into paying for a return ticket that could only be used that day. It was after 11.00pm. Still, I astonished myself by walking alone back to my flat in the Arab quarter through midnight dark streets where the beggars were all asleep. I had left all the drama behind in the streets of Malta where young people clad in red were hanging out of car doors waving flags and yelling their joy at the election result.

So what have I learned about myself apart from the observation about slow travel that has already become a feature of my life?

My attitude to work has changed. I remain committed to doing a good job but I have become clearer about why that is important. When we retire from full-time paid work, we continue to engage with life and the work required to sustain ourselves and make sense of our world. If we take on work in support of someone else's dream, a major factor is aligning personal values with the aims of the project. I applied for the role of citizen journalist because I am interested in the ways in which ordinary people might work together to comment on their circumstances and influence change. That remains a significant focus of my life and of my approach to the work I'm doing here in Brussels. However, I have discovered that sometimes the aims of a project get lost somewhere between the idea and the implementation. Usually, the loss occurs somewhere in the lines of communication and support between the decision-makers and the people on the ground. The loss places enormous strain on workers to find their own meaning and purpose in what they are doing. That's what I have been struggling with during my first weeks in Brussels. I have managed to cope with technological concerns new to an old person like me reasonably well. We three citizen journalists have valiantly interviewed people about how they see the future of the EU. We have edited and uploaded. But we have to grapple with a sense that all these words are going into a black hole never to be heard.

Spoken words of ordinary people are not high profile like big name concerts or exhibitions. I want to make my job meaningful by raising the profile in some way. That's why I started this blog, why I have written a poem, 'The Winner's Circuit', about Trump's visit to Brussels and why I will collaborate with the current group of citizen journalists to write a report about more than 100 interviews that have been uploaded. It would be great to stage an all-singing, all-dancing community theatre production based on the interviews but that would require a team of artists and theatre workers! Maybe next time.

I'll finish this post with a recent ah-ha moment about Brussels. In my first weeks of getting lost walking from my flat to my workplace, I kept stumbling on wide avenues that look the same and disorientated me. On Monday I discovered that these avenues circle the centre of town and follow the lines of the outer defensive walls that no longer exist. I now have a clearer, more confident map of Brussels in my head.