About 25 years ago I wanted to live in a community called Noelleville; a place where I had all my friends. My vision wasn’t a town that revolved around me, it was for community, I just didn’t have the language to express that. I wanted to have a life that was full of people, community and connection.
I was recently thinking back to my younger self, and it dawned on me that I created my intention. I moved myself to a place where I could build that. Where community became my life, and where my evolution as a person and human has been held. Where I’ve built my version of my extended family.
My life consists of connection, whether it’s playing outside, social life, and career that has imbedded me in the community. It’s somewhat of a dream to be able to raise myself in a community, to watch my own evolution. It’s certainly not a fairy tale, there have been friends that have come and gone and other challenges.
There’s something soothing about being able to choose downtime when you know there’s a world outside your house where you can go and connect.
I’ve raised my child here and when I’ve been willing to ask for help, I have had a community to help me. I’ve been able to bridge both myself as an individual and as a mother in ways I’m not sure I would have been able to in other places. I’ve lived in many places across this country, over my nearly fifty years, and I feel like I know two things for certain about what creates joy.
One – living somewhere that you think is beautiful, no matter where that is on the planet, feeling a sense of awe when being outside is a privilege. This is not available for all people, being able to feel blessed to live where you do is not available for a lot of people. Second – have people who you can say hi to when you walk down the street – knowing the eyes and smiles of your neighbours is a blessing.
Being able to stop and chat about small things or big emotional upheavals, at random, with people you know, is something to cherish.
I’m not suggesting that you need to have both these things to be able to live a joyful life, but they certainly do help, among other things, in living a life that feels fulfilling.
Our bodies are wired for connection; we crave it, we need it. We need to know that there are people around us that we can trust and lean on, and we can do the same for others. In a recent interview with Dr Mary Helen Immordina-Yang, speaking to her ground-breaking research on connection and emotions, say’s “We’re biologically wired to be around others, we are dependant on other people for the formulation of our self-identity, and we interact with each other and construct and co-construct a sense self and meaning via those cultural spaces and the nuanced ways of accommodating each other emotionally and physically, that lead to the feeling of ‘us’.”
I take that to mean that without creating our own communities, and finding ways to engage and connect with other’s, we lose a sense of who we are. It will impact our feeling of purpose and motivation.
Understanding ourselves, our desires, what we enjoy and what brings us pain, is learned through relationships. Isolation only brings us more of our own perspectives. Keeping our community small gives us a narrow vantagepoint. We learn about ourselves when we interact with others, from the deepest relationships to peripheral connections (and everything in between). We learn about what brings us joy and how we can connect in healthy ways to ourselves and others, through relationship.
We learn what is healthy connection and what is unhealthy connection, what feels stable and what destabilizes us, we learn through our own behaviours and reactions.
Isolation can increase anxiety, fatigue, rigidity in perspective, decreases our life-span & immunity, and makes it easier for us to misinterpret the world around us.
If you’re keen to improve your life, increase your community. Volunteer, work for people who care about your wellness, keep relationships with people who improve your perspectives and challenge your thinking, and if possible, live in a place that makes you smile when you walk out the door.
You don’t have to move communities to achieve this, you can choose to engage in groups, outside of your workspace that are interesting for you, you can create community wherever you are. You just have to work at it, and be willing to make mistakes along the way.
Life is worth making connections for. Life is full of people wanting to feel connected, we’re not alone in that.