CW 44

To no one in particular,

On the importance of fellowship and community.

"We're all just walking each other home." We're all just trying to figure out next steps. We want to matter. We want bring meaning to our lives. We want something to show for ourselves when we die. A life. A life well-lived. But we fear living. 

I met a colleague, the daughter of folks who settled in this system a very long time ago. She's younger than I am. She's smart, she's ambitious, she's creative, and she's weird. She's a lot of what the known universe needs right now. But she wonders where her life is going? She sees mentions all the celebrities and how much each had accomplished at her age. She feels constrained in her love life and in her professional life. Worse, for her at least, she feels creatively constrained. And so she lays in bed, she tells me, staring at the ceiling. Her gloom is interrupted by a well-meaning mother who asks is she wants a sandwich. The intrusion and the sandwich are unwelcome. They represent stagnation. 

This young colleague and met at an event a while ago. We instantly hit it off. She likes to write and she wants to make films. I've been wanting to write and figured this was a good opportunity to be part of a writing group. Writing doesn't have to be lonely. It should be social in fact. We should share our writing not only so that others can help us make it better, but also to bring feelings to people, to inspire, to entertain, but ultimately because art--whether good or bad--needs to come out into the universe, if only for the good health of the artists.

Writing with this young colleague has been good in more ways than I can count. Not only has writing a story been fun, but in fact, I've been doing a lot more of my other work and I've begun to dream up new projects. It's been good for me to meet with someone who shares a similar interest. We chat about writing and then we chat about life. And then we begin to realize that we face common challenges and that our interlocutors might have solutions to our challenges, or at the very least can offer sympathy.

I've also been hanging out with folks from my kid's school. One mom in particular has been keen on meeting us since our daughters are good friends. She's from this system but from a different planet that had to be terraformed. She's found it difficult to integrate into society here. She says she's bent over backwards for many in an attempt to integrate into a community and to feel less isolated, but the folks here are rather insular. She's not entirely wrong. Outsiders find it hard to integrate a community here. Socio-economic strata define communities. Socio-economic status is attained over generations and needs to be protected. Around that strata a host of cultural and linguistic registers develop that are hard for outsiders to understand and even harder for them to penetrate. For her, and for me, too, it was important to share a moment to recognize the difficulties of adjusting to society here. Again, fellowship and communities are critical. I certainly wish I could do without people and crowds and having to get along, but I also recognize that actually what I don't like is not having the right people around me. We don't do well in places where we can't be ourselves. We do poorly when we're surrounded by a community that is wrong for us. 

The universe is expansive. Keep looking for a place for yourself.