Community: Why Belong?
When researched, the definition of community usually include words like “same,” “shared interests,” “common.” When you think about the different communities we join or belong to, there is sense of familiarity that quickly bonds and attracts others. The sense of familiarity that comes from sharing same interests, beliefs, and values can be strengthening and obviously even comforting. No doubt these communities to which we belong are beneficial and they are a natural expression of life, and living within any number of communities, are even more communities.
Digging more deeply into community there exists a sense of belonging. And this belonging fueled by our need to trust and be safe offers us a refuge in today’s world of polarization, anger, and even outright hostility. These communities to which we ascribe benefit our health and well-being. And in some cases, they help us find meaning and purpose and can even allow us to have an even greater experience or impact than we can generate alone. Communities are natural, needed, and common.
What lies even deeper into these communities to which we align is the place where we find the greatest place of authenticity and the opportunity to be ourselves. It’s in this place of community where we find the greatest absence of loss or loneliness. This place of community is also where we can find the greatest source of encouragement when life is difficult. The sense of caring for one another taking place in community is life giving and life changing. Communities are essential then to everyday living for in these places where we find community is where we find relationships.
The ability to relate, to interact, to exchange life with others is who we are at our core. Relationship is the experience we all share and is fundamental to our human existence. Relationships found in everyday community is both a feeling and an experience we have when living with and sharing with others – in relationship with other human beings. And when living rightly with others, in community, is where we can experience the mutual exchange of support, and even of challenge. When this happens, we can grow, change, and develop. Ironically, where there is the greatest amount of mutual trust and safety, provides the greatest potential for learning and for hearing from a dissenting point-of-view.
With this kind of hearing, learning and sharing - when we can experience the greatest care and concern for each other – we learn! It is in the honest sharing of hard to hear but truthful words of another that we can embrace the words of another as beneficial for change. When others are honest enough to share life changing messages, we experience the greatest benefit of relationships. When we commit to being both hearers and sharers we rise above any initial shared interest only to realize our greatest shared interest is the deep need to connect with others in relationship with them. Above any difference, is the common need to connect with others in any form of community offered to us as living human beings.