I Don’t Want to Share This Only After It Goes Wrong

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Yesterday something happened that, to me, symbolizes how our neighbourhood is no longer what it once was. Not one isolated incident, but an accumulation that shows how consideration for one another keeps disappearing more often, and how tension only gets taken seriously once things almost go wrong.
Mart was walking on the sidewalk behind my mother’s house, on a stretch where you are only allowed to walk. It is narrow there, confusing and actually quite simple: if you really need to cycle there, you are expected to get off your bike. Yet an older man felt he absolutely had to cycle through at that exact moment, right on the narrowest part, while Mart was walking there with our dog. Instead of waiting for a moment or making space, he became threatening: if Mart did not move aside, he would ride straight into him. That is how quickly things can escalate here. From a normal situation to pure intimidation, simply because someone refuses to adjust their own behaviour.
A little later in the park something happened that felt at least just as unsafe. A large shepherd dog was walking loose. We always keep our dog on a leash in the park because he does not do well with other dogs and because the park is simply too small for dogs running freely. Our dog started growling when the shepherd came within half a metre of him. The other dog started growling back. The owner just kept walking as if nothing was happening. Only after Mart repeatedly said that the man needed to call his dog back did he finally do it. This could have escalated badly, because one bite would have been enough for our little dog not to survive.
Almost home, it happened again. Another man, another large dog off leash. Again the same pattern: the dog comes too close, our dog reacts, and the owner does not intervene. When Mart said something about it, he was told that the dog did not have to be leashed and was allowed to walk loose. Legally that may perhaps even be true there, even though you cannot just let a dog approach others. And when they walked on, the dog still remained off leash. Rules or no rules, responsibility was completely pushed aside.
What makes this even heavier for me is that last year there was a serious biting incident in this same park and yes, it involved Mart himself. That is not background information, it is context. Situations like this are not “just tense” for him. They immediately touch something he has already lived through. The body remembers. The alertness, fear and stress are not a choice then, but an automatic response to an environment that once again feels unpredictable and unsafe.
Last night we did not find any real calm from the stress until around half past one. Not because we are dramatic, but because the feeling remained that nobody intervenes, nobody takes responsibility and that this can happen again at any moment. That is what this kind of behaviour does. It does not stop once you get home.
And because of that we cannot do today what normally helps us recover and what we had planned to do. We cannot go into the woods now that the sun is finally shining, cannot decompress, cannot come to rest. Instead we are once again stuck on a bed that has been hurting for far too long. Our body cannot recover, neither can our mind. Everything keeps piling up, and today will feel heavier than it needed to.
This is what people often do not see. That it does not end with one tense moment in the park. That one person’s lack of responsibility directly affects someone else’s entire day, sometimes longer. Especially when there is already a history, like there is with us, where safety is no longer an abstract concept but something that has quite literally gone wrong before.
What affects me most here is not even the behaviour of the dogs, but that of the people: the looking away and the minimizing. The idea that “it is allowed” matters more than sensing when something is unsafe. As if tension only counts once blood is involved. As if others simply have to adapt to whoever pushes hardest.
But even in places where dogs are technically allowed off leash, dogs are still supposed to remain under direct control and should not approach people or other dogs without permission. In a small city park, with narrow paths and leashed dogs, letting dogs run loose is simply not responsible in practice. Anyone who truly wants to let their dog run freely can consciously choose a larger, quieter area outside the city.
What keeps returning here is a fundamental lack of boundaries. Not in the dogs, but in the people refusing to take responsibility for their own actions and only taking tension seriously once things escalate. That is not misunderstanding, that is negligence.
I am not sharing this to point fingers, but because I notice this no longer stands on its own. Our neighbourhood feels different than it used to. Less attention for one another. Less willingness to pause and consider the impact of your behaviour on someone else. And I sincerely hope I am not the only one experiencing this.
Maybe there are more people who go through this and swallow it down until now. Then I hope these experiences get shared. Not only after something goes wrong again, but now, while we still can adjust.
I hope this reaches people someday. Not to prove myself right, but because nobody should only become safe after something goes wrong again.