The value of community
Reflecting on community in our lives
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men. ”
Note: this post was written in April. Future posts will more directly address the issues of race, oppression and systemic breakdowns. Community plays a significant role in learning, facing our own biases and strengths, and continually testing our assumptions and views. By changing how we interact with the concept of community - how we define it, how we nurture it, how we grow it - we change our own role and impact in the broader environment. I welcome your comments to the thoughts below and look forward to sharing more with you.
A great deal of reflection is occurring right now, from very intimate personal levels through broad, societal levels. Few things trigger reflection like shocks to the system. A pandemic, arising during a period of widespread geopolitical shifts, increased awareness of climatic impacts and general malcontent, is quite a significant disruption. What will shake out of it?
On a personal level, I have explored the role of community in my life. The disruption has allowed me to take a closer look at what binds me to others. Not limited by conventional notions of community (e.g., a company that I’m part of, a large family unit, a religious group), I realized many of my deeper connections come from communities I created over time. What characterizes these communities is they often coalesce around shared objectives. Many friends came from volunteer work, activism, social justice, intellectual pursuits, academic work, professional endeavors. And all of these elements in my life - the people, the activities, the purpose - were intertwined, each reinforcing each other and adding to the whole. Funnily enough, it wasn’t until I entered the corporate world that these elements were pulled apart and taken out of balance for the first time in my life.
When I first heard the phrase “work-life balance” at my McKinsey orientation, it struck me as strange. Up to that point I had lived one life, without these delineations, but rather a nice blended tapestry of everything. However, I was in a new environment and eager to learn about this conundrum that people kept discussing.
Over time, I saw that these artificial walls between “work” and “life” (whatever that encompassed), did not work for me. I was not wired that way (I would argue, based on observation, that humans are not wired that way, but let me focus here on my personal story) and have always blended my “work” and “life” into one big community. I had lived without those artificial walls separating my life into compartments, seeing everyone as a community that can come together. As I lost the in-person interactions during the pandemic, and had to intentionally and consciously connect virtually, the idea of community and its role took a pronounced form.
“No man is an island.”
Our individual strength often reflects the strength of our community and connections. That community enables us to grow and flourish. It challenges us, motivating us to keep learning and viewing the world through different eyes. Communities help us to find our purpose, to test and hone our values, and to be a part of something greater than ourselves. They are the antidote to complacency and stagnation on a personal level (also, a potential antidote to the Dunning-Kruger effect).
Community is a critical part of how I approach life and why it is embedded in Open Rivers’ business model. I look to the community of experts that I have had the opportunity to meet over the years. These experts challenge me, support me and share their insights, and in turn, I hope I do likewise for them. My ability to learn and stay on top of many disparate topics, industries, perspectives and ways of approaching problems, directly relates to my ability to reach out to such a phenomenal and diverse group of individuals that form these communities, built across place and time.
Repeatedly, these communities have demonstrated the power of sharing our diverse stories. It is too easy to be so submerged in our own space and our craft, that we forget what others do. There is a significant personal and societal cost to this. If we fail to appreciate how our lives depend on the work of many and work to sustain these connections, we run the risk of living in our own silos.
The Open Rivers podcast is intended to provide a sampling of the breadth of what expertise and talent lies all around us. It is also a way for me to share these incredible communities that I’m lucky to be part of with you. Through short interviews, I speak with a range of experts around the world who have wed their passions with their work and connection to communities. In these discussions, you can see how those worlds of “work” and “life” are usually melded, into a continuum, where we are constantly finding new ways to connect and support each other.
I hope you and your community are safe and well, and that you too are finding ways to connect and bolster each other through this difficult period, and through whatever else life brings us!