How Relationships and Community Fulfill the Same Need for Connection

PHIL: In this culture, there is a strong focus on the individual. It is your responsibility to take care of yourself, to stay alive, to plan for the future. And yet, we are not a solitary species; we are a social species who need each other to survive. This is an intrinsic part of our nature, and connecting with others fills a deep longing.

It is a need just as much as food, water, and shelter are. And yet it does not announce itself the same way that hunger, thirst, and cold do because it is spread so widely. Yes, we can say we miss a particular person, sometimes very deeply, but I think the sense of being in a community comes from the many connections that we have, and we often fail to recognize and value that.

If I keep asking who you are, I’ll get a slew of answers starting with your name, and then various identities you have — a parent, a dental technician (or whatever your career has been), a photographer, a Grateful Dead fan. You feel at home with other Deadheads or dentists or whoever your tribe is; people like you who share interests or passions or activities.

When this happens, we lose ourselves to a greater or lesser extent and become part of the group. This is cool, in general, and is like a vacation away from home. Great music groups like The Band talk about the sense of unity when playing together. I’ll point out that there can also be a dark side to this. Deindividuation occurs with cults, witch hunts, violent crowds, and lynch mobs.

Personal relationships also fulfill the same need for connection. Of course, you have to be open to sharing yourself and open to accepting the other person as they are, appreciating the shock of difference and enjoying the recognition of similarity. Easy to say, harder to do, as we all have our own ideas about how things should be. Letting go of that need to control is the key to being open and connecting. The more you can do that, the more that itch for connection gets scratched.

MAUDE: Community. I’ve been thinking about it a lot these past few days. As many of you know, I am the steward of a Little Free Library (Phil does a great job when I’m not around!). Several times this week, people have stopped to share with me how much our Little Library has contributed to creating a community feeling in this neighborhood, and how important it is to them. That is saying a lot, as we live downtown, on a street with mixed residential and businesses/offices.

People take out books, leave books with notes for the library, return books, and generally take part in making this a library for our community. I overheard two women talking as they went by the other day, and one said to the other, “I put a book in yesterday, and it was gone later that day!” She was proud and excited to be participating.

Community. I believe that we are all drawn strongly toward that sense of belonging. We recognize our deep connections to one another on a visceral level. We respond to both being engaged with one another, and to our individual paths. To some, they’ve been taught to trust only those that they feel are the same as they are. However community is defined, we all have that push to come together.

We follow the same pattern in our close relationships. We create community with another and receive support, acceptance, and acknowledgment. We feel seen and heard. At the same time, we pursue our own path, and in peaceful relationships, we gain insight into those individual paths from the interactions with others.

The latter is true when we experience some disturbance and turn inward to find out what is happening, rather than place blame on the other person for what we are feeling. We learn to examine and recognize information about ourselves from those times of discomfort or feelings of being out of sync. We also grow when, through the sharing from the other person, we hear something we can relate to our own processes that we hadn’t seen or understood before.

Our close relationships can offer a wonderful feedback loop for spreading peace within the larger communities by taking the same practices we master in those interactions and spreading them.

Here are some other posts we have written about community and connection.

Why It’s Important to Relate to Community as Well as Individuals “ I’ve been reflecting recently on how cooperation (literally: working together) is a fundamental aspect of society. Take bread, for example; it needs people to plant wheat, harvest it, thresh and mill it, bake it, package it, deliver it and sell it. Now do the same for a thousand other items, from cars to computers. Cooperation is so ubiquitous that it becomes invisible and people only see society in terms of competition, which is the jostling by which we pick the most efficient ways to work together and produce things. This working together is a basic feature of humans, going back forever. We were tribes and groups even before we invented language, and the need for connection, both material and emotional, is built into us. Go and live by yourself for the rest of your life if you don’t believe me. No contact with others, no goods of any kind. Very few people could survive.”

Community in the Year of the Virus “Besides meeting face-to-face, there are lots of things missing from our lives: going to the theater; walking on the bluffs; visiting the local library. But we don’t like to look at our lives in terms of what is missing. It is far more satisfying to see them as simply being different, and there is much changed that we appreciate. Cleaner air. Quieter streets. Birdsong. Springtime. Add to that, a heightened sense of community. Our personal experience has taught us that the most critical element for having this awareness and appreciation is to stay present with whatever is happening; not to spend time wishing things were different or how they used to be, but actually being present with how they are. In the moment of now, we can savor every connection, each meeting with old and new friends, and share our stories in a way that we can all inspire and comfort each other. We are truly becoming aware of our communities and the importance and value they have to us.”

Why Being in Continuous Connection is Vital for Peaceful Relationships “My sense of Maude is of openness, caring, and sharing. It makes it easy to be with her. You may call this grace or luck, but there is also an intentionality about how we are together. We know what to avoid, and that is being rude, being short, being catty, being disconnected, out of reach, snippy. It is (relatively) easy to avoid those attitudes because I know her essential goodness; such criticism would not be justified. And how do I know? To repeat myself, I have a sense of who she is that comes from (or maybe is) our sense of connection. This sense of connection has great power. Firstly, it has this strange property that we are both drawing from the same well; we have always been able to make our own choices and path through life mesh. By now, we understand that this is always the case. Or to be more woo-woo about it, there is an us, neither me nor Maude, that we become aware of by setting our egos aside. After all, what else could the connection between us, the mid-point, be, except that? By both of us tapping into that, we can proceed together through life.”

Originally published at https://philandmaude.substack.com.