Close Encounters Of The Third Place

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

I was walking home from Reformer Pilates. I was thinking about the rise in middle-class exercise classes in studios filled with plants with inspirational quotes on the walls and the article I’d read in The Times complaining that these intimidating and impressive-looking sprung resistance machines were extremely distant cousins of the revered practice of Pilates and that Mr Pilates who invented this type of body conditioning in the 1920s, and after whom it must always be capitalised, would be turning in his grave. And seeing as he’d designed the original reformer apparatus, I wasn’t sure what they meant. And it was bit like saying we should have stopped music at jazz or films at silent or messaging at the telegram and I quite liked this particular evolution because bouncing off a jumpboard is a lot less boring than breathing on a mat. Plus, I was finding the variety of instructors interesting like the Paloma Faith lookalike with the leg warmers who made it a bit like a disco and the one with the soothing voice who placed particular emphasis on the cool down because I enjoyed lying there like a frog swinging from side to side for five minutes and I could happily have stayed like that for the rest of the day.

A small crowd had gathered at the side of the road. There were two badly parked cars, but this wasn’t particularly unusual close to my local delicatessen where people regularly abandon their vehicles so they can run in quickly to grab a lasagne and a tub of coleslaw. A woman with a buggy was explaining to another woman with a shopping trolley what might have happened. “I think he just toppled out,” she said. An elderly man was sitting on the kerb. He seemed a bit dazed. Someone was holding what looked like kitchen roll to his head. I was passing by on the other side like the Levite thinking there were already plenty of Samaritans and I didn’t need to stop when a lady started jogging alongside me. She seemed to want to engage me in conversation. “Do you think they’ve called an ambulance?” she said, and I wondered if I had one of those faces that looks like it knows things. “I’d imagine that would be the first thing you’d do,” I replied because I still have a kind of faith in people not to be stupid and I believe angels will always appear when you need them like there’s usually a medical expert on a plane, or a cardiologist who knows how to use the blood pressure cuff at church when someone cowps, as my husband likes to describe it, or a tall person who will reach something down from the top shelf for you, or a strong one who will run along pushing your car until it starts again when you’ve broken down. “It’s very distressing,” I said, and I found there was a sudden wobble in my voice. And when I got home, I’d say to my husband that it had taken me by surprise and I reckoned it was because it was a man who was bleeding and this seemed especially vulnerable and because I have an elderly father who could easily topple out of something and I have realised I am now trusting in the kindness of strangers because I can’t be everywhere. “The binmen have stopped to help,” said the lady who was still jogging alongside me. And there had been a lot of negative things happening in the world recently and we both found this pausing of the refuse collection especially poignant. And this was just a tiny moment, and we’d likely never see each other again, but it was as if we’d both been unexpectedly warmed by what we’d seen and we’d believed in something again, and I wasn’t sure if there was a name for encounters like this, but I decided I’d call it a close encounter of the third place.

I’ve been reading recently about third places, how much we need them, how we lost them for a bit during the pandemic, how for all sorts of reasons they’ve been disappearing ever since, and how hanging out in online third places like Facebook and Nextdoor and LinkedIn can never replace the face-to-face versions. The third place, a term coined in the 1980s by the American sociologist, Ray Oldenburg, refers to the social spaces that are separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. Third places are places where people are not required to be anything other than themselves. They are under no obligation to be there. They are free from expectations. There is no pressure to be productive or efficient or successful or conform to any particular standard. Examples of third places include coffee shops, libraries, gyms, parks, churches, bars, clubs, golf courses, waiting rooms, beauty salons, post offices, Pilates classes, anywhere you might strike up a conversation and chat to others and feel unexpectedly warmed. Third places are integral to forging relationships. They provide informal interactions and friendships. They build community. They are places where you might bump into people you know as well as make new connections. They play an important role in helping us find individual and collective identities. In an increasingly lonely society, they are essential for mental health and wellbeing. We need third places for societal survival. And we need close encounters of the third place to give us hope, to help us see we are part of something bigger, to encourage us to believe in some sort of shared humanity.

This week in advance of back-to-school, I did the annual trip to the opticians. I reckoned I had PTSD as I relived all the other manic journeys I’d ever done with children as I tried to make it in time for their appointment, navigating my way across the city in heavy rain through the roadworks that seemed to have popped up everywhere. The third child was panicking about being short-sighted and losing her status as the only one with 20/20 vision in the family. The youngest had sat on her glasses so needed a new pair. The second eldest had decided she wanted to upgrade hers before starting university. As I arrived in late and stressed, I remembered how I’d always arrived in late and stressed to the opticians and the optometrist, who I only saw every two years, would always take my glasses off me and she’d stand and polish them. She’d clean them lovingly until they shone, until I could see clearly through them again. And she always did that for me because there was a decade when she only knew me as the woman who regularly left in frames to be repaired because they’d been damaged by her children, and this was the only way she could help me. And there was one time when we sat in the darkened room with the machines around us and she told me about her son’s skiing accident, how he’d never quite be the same again, how he was learning to walk again and she cried, and I listened. And I reckoned that was a close encounter of the third place too, and sometimes we need these close encounters to be with people we don’t see very often or never see again because these light-touch interactions matter as much if not more than the heavy ones.

And I thought about how we always feel better after we’ve been to third places and have close encounters of the third place and yet they’re not always something we prioritise because home comes first and work comes second and we’re busy and I wanted something solid to describe this feeling because unexpectedly warmed seemed a little inadequate and then there was a line I heard in a Belinda Carlisle song, “with a stroke of love on the canvas on my soul”, and I reckoned that might do because close encounters of the third place are like briefly brushing against each other’s souls.

I’d love to hear if you have any experiences of close encounters of the third place?