ANEW: Making Community in All the Right Places
Finding the love and the lessons in community
For KND
I asked a young friend—this post is dedicated to him—what I should write about today. Without hesitation he said, community.
I pressed him: Tell me more. What have you been up to? Where has life been taking you? Without giving away his identity, I’ll share this: on a recent extended trip to Spain, he told me he missed community in the way you miss a love, or a lover. He missed the touch and caress of it. My words, not his, but the sentiment is clear. That ache you feel when suddenly you are without the warmth and wisdom of familiar voices, without the laughter in the next room, without the arms of people who know you well.
Community can be like that. A love. A lover. Not a radical notion at all. Both stretch and enlarge the heart. Both help us see ourselves anew.
When you begin something new — a new job, a new relationship, even a new way of looking at yourself — loneliness comes with it. There is no escaping that. Starting over or being in a new place among new people demands that you confront the silence alone, that you ask yourself what this new path requires of you. No one else can fully answer. You just have to trust, in the deepest sense, that you will be all right. That you will always be all right.
I think back to my young friend in that unfamiliar room in Spain. He missed his old bed. He missed his brother and sister. He missed his mother’s words of patience and wisdom, even when those words sometimes stung. But he discovered that he could endure. That the absence of community was not the end of wholeness, but the beginning of a new way of being whole.
That’s the strange paradox of it. Sometimes you must step outside of community to rediscover its power. Sometimes you have to sit alone before you can fully feel together.
Community, in this way, is always asking questions of us:
What in the heck was I thinking?
What compelled me to leave the safety of everything that I knew to be alone in a strange place?
Although this place is new and different, where is that one thing, that one view, that always brought me comfort and joy? Where might I find that next?
Will I be all right in the end?
What advice might I give to this young man or any person seeking comfort while putting themselves out there in a totally new situation that might require loneliness and the loss of the familiar? As a teacher — and as a student, always — I know the only way to answer is to step toward those edges of experience. In other words, leverage the things that you know to make you a student of sometyhing new. Not to wait passively for time to deliver the perfect reflection, but to walk right out into the borderlands of what is known and unknown.
Sometimes that means showing up in a new way or a new community and becoming quickly familiar with traditions, holidays, or routines that might bring you comfort in the end. I might suggest starting by attending a church, synagogue, or mosque near where you live — not once but a few times — to feel the ritual and the initial uncomfortableness of experiencing someone else’s sacred routine or ceremony. In this way, you learn something about yourself by marking what you pay attention to — or even noticing the things that you judge without knowing you are doing so.
In the end, I advise myself and others to look for new ways of being and seeing. Last but not least, sometimes it means visiting the same place in a new place over and over again, recognizing the joy in the voice of the same waitress who greets you at a local eatery, genuinely glad that you came back. It’s getting to the familiar before you have to travel on again. Small acts, quiet rituals, moments that stitch us back into belonging, back to ourselves in the end. The return.
At the edges, the universe whispers: there is more to you. Go discover it.
My young friend is still traveling. South America is up next. With every journey, he’s learning a little more about what the universe has to teach. He is becoming not just a student but a discoverer, perhaps even an explorer in the truest sense.
And in that way, we are connected. Because whether we are in a classroom, at a café, or among strangers in a foreign land, the search for community — its warmth, its reflection, its love — is always with us.
May it always be so.
Curated Listening:
Donny Hathaway sings with both ache and hope, a reminder that community is not only about gathering but also about enduring, about being sustained until freedom and wholeness arrive. It’s prayerful and powerful. Listen to Someday We’ll All Be Free HERE.