Connection and community are words scattered all around my website. These are two big guiding values in my life. I often struggle to make decisions, so I consistently write down a list of values and choose my top 5. Connection and community come out on top over and over. Yet, recently my perspective on these two ideas shifted.
What does connection mean to you? What about community? How do these two concepts manifest in your life?
For the longest time connection and community meant the physical people, right in front of me, in my life. It was who surrounded me and how often I saw them. Even though I saw that I was connected and had a community around me, well, I still felt disconnected.
It was such a bizarre feeling. Here was a very important value of mine that felt so far away. I really struggled with trying to build community, to reconnect, to align with these ideas that I felt made me, me. Who was I without connection?
Slowly, my idea of community evolved. Maybe it wasn’t the physical people around me. Maybe instead it was the ideas that linked me to like-minded people.
I felt so disconnected because often I was around people who didn’t quite share my values. Start talking about your values. This is how you find like-minded people.
As these new ideas of community and connection started to percolate in my mind, another thought occurred to me. How could I find true connection if I was choosing to constantly put myself in spaces where I felt disconnected? In a place like that I couldn’t even connect to myself. To really understand me and what I was all about, I needed more time alone. Being alone isn’t half as bad as I used to believe. When you’re with other people you’re usually at their whim. When you spend time alone you get to focus more on your interests. There is a nice balance between the two.
Spending more time alone gave me a much better sense of connection. During some of this time, I ended up reading “All About Love” by bell hooks, where she talks about loving community. She writes, “Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
Solitude is where you can really be yourself and embrace who you are. In the end, you’ll find yourself surrounded by a community where you have deep, loving connection.