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Great discussion last night about what community is (and isn’t).

Some thought-provoking ideas came up at this comfortable-sized potluck at DK’s studio. The food was so good, too. Thanks so much to those of you who joined us to share your thoughts at Gather.

And a special thanks to John Boylan for moderating.

A summary

For those of you who missed it, here are a couple of ideas that emerged.

At one point in time, it would have seemed absurd for anyone to try to want to “make” community. It was just there. A given.

Multigenerational events feel more like community gatherings than when everyone’s the same age.

In urban settings, people have the choice to participate in events where there will be other people. You always have the option of leaving a group.

Time and effort. People have this idea that community comes along when you move to a place where it’s there. But that’s not how it goes. It takes work to build a community, it takes taking risks, and making your emotional self vulnerable. It takes time, too.

Then again, people can form instantaneous sense of belonging in a camplike setting, even if it’s just for a few hours. Like what happens at an artist retreat nearby called Smoke Farm.

But even in those cases, there’s someone doing a lot of background work to set that up, over time. Think of Burning Man.

Oftentimes it takes some kind of figure to organize things and keep people involved and connected. (Hearing this reminded me of the book One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote this totally chauvinistic book that keeps you totally intrigued and ends spectacularly.)

There are many levels of communities.

Is a community just a network of relationships? Those relationships can be positive or negative, but the collection is the thing we’re talking about.

Care. If you care about people, and do things for them, that’s what makes a community. Even if you don’t like everyone in the group, knowing that you’d help them in a crisis is a key indicator of the bonds that are really there.

Do we identify ourselves based on who’s in our various communities?

What makes community is when people gather for a common reason: whether it’s sharing a meal, moving a heavy box together, or being together in a spiritual context. Breaking bread together. Companionship literally means, “with bread.”

We have to take care to not try to “belong” to groups we don’t genuinely connect with.

For further discussion

What do you think? Does it make sense to feel nostalgic about the loss of community we feel in modern life? Or has the notion of belonging to a group evolved somehow?

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