On Community

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In the past year, I have found myself reflecting on community-building a lot.

And I have to be honest with you: this was pretty surprising for me. I have an international soul, and thus am known to wander off from one corner of the country/world to another without too much notice. This has resulted in me having friends sprinkled across cultures and continents, which truly brings me deep joy. And thinking back, even before my traveling spirit took frame in college, I kind of grew up in a way that never allowed me to form too deep of ties to people–I changed school districts between elementary and middle school, and then again during high school. This, coupled with being raised by a mom who touted a “lone wolf” approach to the world, set me up to navigate the world in a similar fashion for most of my life.

However, somehow both slowly and all at once, I’ve become preoccupied with this idea of community. Maybe it came about from setting up life in a new city amidst a pandemic, knowing no one and faced with establishing connections from scratch during a time when people were intentionally creating distance between one another. Or, it could be due to the loss of a long-term best friend that took me by surprise and left me with almost no one to confide in. Or, maybe it was the 3am health crisis that my roommate had; and as he laid seizing on our apartment floor, despite being in a building full of people, I felt myself at a loss on who I could call on for help.

Whatever the cause, community is at the top of my mind in ways that it has never been for me before. And now that it is, I’m taking in the world with a new lens, noticing different things and navigating it differently as well. There’s a ton to be said on the subject, but I want to first lay some groundwork on what I mean when I speak of community.

Admittedly, while i spent much time alone on my international travels, i was rarely lonely—and i’m immensely grateful to my scattered international community for that.🫶🏽

An Intro To The Conversation

During a conversation focused on community with a stranger, I realized that there was a weird disconnect within our discussion. Turns out, when he thought of community members, his mind went to civil servants like fire fighters and police officers. I don’t know whether it is funny or sad, because I imagine that his rudimentary concept of community came from a grade school textbook–maybe a Beginner Spanish book with a cartoon map labeled ‘La Comunidad’, identifying ‘el parque’ and ‘la biblioteca’ to help reinforce vocabulary words.

However, when faced with explaining it, I did find it hard to encapsulate into a simple definition. It’s not always something you can point to or hold in your arms; it’s both something that’s a thing and a feeling. It’s in part about people, as well as the lived experience that is intrinsically tied to connecting with people.

When I think about community–and, namely, a community fabric that I want for myself and my future family–I can’t help but reminisce on experiences that I had in my own youth. Those include housewarmings and cookouts, carpool schedules to soccer practices, and neighborhood yard sales. And I imagine that some 90s and 2000s TV shows likely also subconsciously shaped how I think about community; cartoons like Rugrats, where childcare was a shared effort across neighbors, households were multigenerational, and excursions and outings were coordinated and experienced together, to the benefit of the children and adults alike.

But of course, the concept of community doesn’t take a singular form. For my present stage of life as a single and childless 20-something living in a major urban area, for example, I feel like community would look like having people to do Costco runs with outside the city, to attend street festivals with, to help pack/unpack their apartment, and to share sourdough starter with.

A recent community contribution:

Caring for my godson for a month.

Further, it’s incredibly important to note that community is a multi-dimensional concept. Some may hear ‘community’ and just think of it to mean ‘having a group of friends’. And while a friend group can certainly be part of one’s community, it definitely should not be considered as the entirety of it. The type of community I think about also thrives on 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections. Because when your car breaks down, you may not know a mechanic, but perhaps your coworker’s cousin knows a guy with a carshop in the area. Diverse and extended tendrils of a community helps strengthen it, and in turn serves to benefit all the members 

So back to the main question: what is community? In essence, I see a community as a network of people to endure life alongside, from the milestones to the mundane. It’s about being connected to a fabric of diverse people, directly or indirectly, in a way that everyone can (and should!) make deposits into and withdrawals from the proverbial community pot, so that everyone can be both supportive and supported. For my current purposes, I do tend to focus on place-based community, emphasizing a sense of community that is rooted in direct proximity (i.e. your neighborhood, city, town, county)–but generally it isn’t a requirement.


Closing Thoughts (for now)

(This has already gotten long, so I’ll round things out for now.)

I’m pretty deliberate about where I dedicate my thoughts and energy. So I’m taking the fact that community-mindedness has taken hold of a lone wolf like myself as a sign of something worth exploring, at the very least (and at the most—see below). Given that I think about it a good amount these days, I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts and findings on the subject of community, such as:

  • the breakdowns in community I’m observing

  • the impacts that community (and lack thereof) has in all aspects of our lives

  • my thoughts on the main culprits of community erosion

  • experiencing and recovering from community fatigue/trauma

  • my own journey in building community from scratch

But I won’t leave you with a cliffhanger here, because my mind is pretty decisively made up.

If it isn’t already clear, my conclusion is pretty simple: Community. Is. Everything.

And if you’re like me and haven’t lived a life thus far where those three words resonated strongly, I hope you’re willing to join me in the new endeavor and do some exploration with it as well.

Thanks for reading.

Community is like a garden—tend to it, and it can serve you well.