I am excited to share this beautifully written guest post today by author Irene Noor. Irene is the author of the novel Yet, Home, the 2017 Being in Community Book of the Year. You can follow her on Facebook here and buy her book here.
By Irene Noor
I had a dream many nights ago. In it, we were leaving our home. We were moving to a faraway place that I love and would almost certainly be very happy living, but we were leaving this home.
We would be disappearing from the street we walk down daily and the neighborhood school and the local shops and library. We would be absent from the places in the city we love to frequent, and from the lives of the friends and acquaintances we share our worries and celebrations with.
And then there’s our home itself. Its rooms and corners are layered with memories, memories that would fade without the place holders that this house provides. It’s not just our place of shelter and warmth, but of comfort, safety, and belonging. It’s the place where we can relax and snuggle while snow, wind and rain drive against the windows.
And in my dream, we were leaving it all. Yes, we were going to a beautiful place, and yet I woke up sad.
Sunset down the street (c) Irene Noor 2016
The sadness was a revelation. Until recently, I’d never given much thought to our neighborhood and community. They met most of our criteria for where we wanted to live, but they were also just where our house, which we do love, happened to be located.
But this post isn’t about how I love my neighborhood. It’s not about the connections I see among the previously anonymous houses. Rather, it’s about what it means to belong to a community. We throw around the word “community” a lot. Politicians talk about improving our communities. Business owners talk about serving the needs of the local community. But do we all feel like we belong to one? And what defines it? A place of worship, if we practice a faith? Is it neighbors? Extended family? Work colleagues? School sports teams?
It is a word that is used to describe, I would posit, two separate things: a) people with whom we share the same basic needs and interests, and b) whoever we make space for in our lives. I’m sure most people in my neighborhood and city would agree that services like garbage collection and snow plowing are things we all would like to see continue, as are safe streets and good first responder services. So that’s the sharing needs and interests part: fairly straightforward until you get into the details, which I won’t do much of today.
The other component to community is who we make space for in our lives, and by that definition, community varies for each of us. A sampling of TV shows demonstrates the different forms of community well: friend groups, work colleagues, extended families, more work settings, roommates, other friend or family groups. For many people, structured social settings (school, then work, etc.) are often sources of community, but not always. What is always true is that the people in our communities, no matter how we define them, are flawed. More on that later.
Until the past couple of years, I’d always found community in the structured social settings of my life. Now, though, I am learning that I don’t always share the same values that put me in the same place as folks, folks I might previously have thought were part of my community. I have given a lot of thought to the question of what to do with that dissonance. (I’m not talking about relationships that are destructive or unhealthy–from those, one ought to just walk away.) I’m talking about when your expectations of a person, or of your relationship with them, simply need to be recalibrated. Like when you realize this person who you thought cared about everything you care about turns out to only like the same music. Or when you are going through a tough time and realize someone is just absent. In cases like that, I think we simply need to apply different expectations to that relationship.
It can be lonely, this realization. It can be uncomfortable. That’s the reality of it.
There’s been a lot of talk about how we create echo chambers: we surround ourselves, virtually and maybe physically, with like-minded people, and people with different beliefs and lifestyles become more and more alien to us, their reasons for their choices more and more uni-dimensional and ridiculous. Like most people, I recognize the danger this distancing poses to our society as a whole, and even to that first definition of community (people with whom we share the same needs and interests). Most of us don’t want to live in an echo chamber, but yet as a whole, we do. Increasingly so.
So how do we reconcile these conflicting desires? How do we stay connected to people whose beliefs and values are different? More particularly, and more difficult still, how do we stay connected to, and even show respect for, people whose beliefs or choices we see as deeply flawed? And aren’t we really just saying that there are flaws we can live with–since we are all flawed–and flaws we can’t? And for those us for whom love is a guiding life principle, how do we not just stay connected to these people, but love them with a philia love, a love of sisterhood/brotherhood, of friendship?
Most of us don’t want to live in an echo chamber. Except when we are tired of striving and just need to rest among friends. And when that happens, I think it’s important that we take that rest. But we can’t stay there long. We have to go back out among the wider community.
The more I reflect on it, the more it seems to me that the answer is not overly complicated. We make space for the people in our lives who love and support us, flaws and all. These are our closest friends and/or family, the people with whom our relationships are rich and who make our life a life. Then there is the wider circle of acquaintances and perhaps even friends we are connected to somehow. Sometimes it’s because we belong to the same social structures. Sometimes it’s because we are related. Sometimes it’s because we live in the same place and have the same vested interests in that place. However it’s happened, we are connected.
In my world, I’m redefining that outer circle. Adjusting expectations in both directions. Realizing that what I thought was gold is actually brass, but that sometimes brass is perfectly good. Realizing also that in taking a tentative step among the familiar unknown, I am seeing glimmers of what is likely new gold. There is a wide world to discover at my doorstep, literally. Beneath the unpleasant winters and dreary landscapes, I’ve found rich lives and values I didn’t know were there. My local community–in a very real sense my neighborhood and city–is the home of my home.
Renewing my sense of community may be easier to do in a new place, but here, where the seeds are already sown, there is fertile soil for renewal. It just takes the courage to break old habits. I have learned, without realizing it, to love my home, imperfect as it is. And that, in turn, maybe my home, my community, will love me back, imperfections and all.
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