How to build community
Where I live, community still matters.
People wave when they drive pass. If I’m out walking, often drivers stop to say hello, or ask if I want a lift somewhere.
Often enough I don’t lock the house when I go out.
If I ask a neighbour for help, I know it’ll be offered. If a neighbour can’t help, they’ll suggest someone who can.
Often small acts of kindness are offered because that’s what neighbours do.
It’s not an in-and-out-of-each-others houses kind of neighbourliness. Quite the reverse. I’ve seldom been past the door of anyone else’s house.
That doesn’t alter the fact that, round here, community matters.
If someone’s struggling — through age, illness, poverty or for other reason — usually, quietly, assistance appears.
That’s how it’s always been in remote places. Many are connected by family. There are connections by marriage. There are connections based on the ethics of good neighbourliness.
I’ve been here for a little over eighteen months. Once it was known I lived here (rather than having a holiday home here that would stand empty most of the year), I was accepted as part of a community.
Yesterday the snow came.
That’s not so common round here, but yesterday it fell, last night it froze and today it’s falling again.
I went for a walk to the beach this morning, through something like a mini-blizzard. Things outside have changed a little. Not massively but noticeably.
The young fella who works on the farm up the road stopped and talked a little longer than normal. The postman too. An older fella I often chat with on my walks stopped me and we talked longer, deeper and somehow more personally than we have before.
Each conversation began with comments on the snow and the icy wind blowing off the sea. Each conversation moved onto other, somehow bigger things.
I’ve experienced it before, living in cities. The snow comes down and the way people meet changes.
It’s tempting to put it down to playful, childlike wonder. I’m sure that’s there. We experience some profound emotion when we remember the world is wonderful, beautiful and a source of awe. We like (most of us) to share that feeling with those we meet.
There’s something more happening though.
The snow is a shared event.
It’s a shared experience.
It’s what we are, today, sharing.
That shared ‘now’ provides a powerful encouragement to remember, reinforce and deepen the shared bonds of neighbourliness, community, society and universal compassion.
So much of what we’re sold in contemporary culture opposes the collective or shared.
We consume media and games alone in our houses. We wear headphones against the world. We use our resources to buy exclusivity. We’re encouraged to access connection through the isolation of the computer screen.
Larger dystopias are looming. Meta’s metaverse where all contact is mediated through (expensive) interfaces. Augmented, Virtual and Artificial realities. Extreme technophiliacs imagine distant futures where we dispense with bodies altogether, and interact, eternally, though the interplay of online consciousness.
If we isolate ourself forever behind a screen, how will we share the experience of snow and a biting cold wind?
Shared experience is the ground for connection and community.
I’m currently reading Charles Eisenstein’s book; ‘Climate: A New Story’.
I’ve not finished it yet so can’t comment on its entire trajectory, but there are rich insights in it. One of them is this: even though most people accept there are significant unfolding problems relating to climate, as do the majority of governments and businesses, not enough is being done to change direction.
Why?
Eisenstein proposes (and I find it hard to argue), that most of us are more persuaded by our actually lived, shared experience than we are by ‘facts’ ‘statistics’ and information we have to take on trust from experts (however much we might or might not genuinely trust the scientific experts behind climate statistics).
Put simply, facing the horror of ecocidal, genocidal late capitalism, though we know things are bad and must change, we pay attention to more immediate things: paying for heating, clothing the kids, distracting oneself from the daily struggle with small or large luxuries.
The myriad demands of NOW have greater weight than future-scenario statistics or events that are mainly happening elsewhere.
My immediate neighbour is a farmer. He’s semi-retired after a life working hard, but living comfortably off the European Union’s rip-up-nature-and-replace-it-with-quantifiably-productive-land subsidies.
He’s a good man.
I talk with him of rewilding, but there’s no great meeting of minds. We laugh. We’re friendly. He listens and gives alternative perspectives based in what he knows. Nothing changes.
The ‘facts’ I cite and the ‘facts’ he lives by, occupy separate universes.
Sometimes though I ask him about the landscape. His family has been here generations. He remembers how things were half a century ago. He remembers his grandfathers talking of life here a century ago.
He talks of what’s changed. Normally, though not always, that’s a story of what’s been lost.
If I ask him what we could do to restore the streams, bogs, fields, fauna and flora he remembers with such joy, he becomes, suddenly, and ardent advocate for the environment — one with much greater practical know-how than I’ll ever have.
Though I’m new here, we share the landscape and a love of what it gives us.
From that sharing grows the foundations of community.
If I want to encourage the regeneration of landscape in this, my new home, it’ll not come by appealing to, nor quoting statistics. It’ll happen because we find a common urge to cherish and restore what we share.
Not planting a tree because it contributes to carbon sequestration, but because it’s beautiful. Restoring many tiny patches of land because we want to see our grandkids playing outside like our grandfathers and grandmothers did, to hear birds sing, see flowers bloom in leaf-enriched soil. Not valuing the world for the profit it yields, nor treating nature as problem to be solved, but for what it is — the shared space which is our home.
Shared not only with other humans.
Truly shared.
When the snow comes there’s a shared experience which reminds us all we’re more than the things that divide us.
That shared experience is always there if we but notice it.
It’s called ‘the world’.
Perhaps the work of our time is to see the world anew, with the same fresh, awe-struck eyes we use to see fresh snow translate the familiar into fairyland.
After thirty years performing, directing and teaching around the world, now I coach and mentor artists and others to live in joy and creativity. I still perform sometimes.
I recently published a free training ‘How to make BIG decisions when you feel really stuck’. It’s a PDF and video. Get your copy here.
More information about programmes I’m currently offering here: www.johnbritton.co
Email: [email protected]