The responsibility of Community
The necessity of community
I have talked about my framework for life balance. I delineate four areas of life that you have to balance. They are Work, Health, Spiritual and Family. These are labels I use, but they encompass more than the label. When I say “Family” I mean more than just those blood relatives or people you live with. I mean “Community”. I mean that intersection of groups that you are a member of by birth, habit, geography or choice that are part of you and help you define your place in the world.
In a perfect world all of the areas of your life would be united and complimentary. Usually, this is not the case and that is why talking about life balance is even necessary. Usually the different areas of life compete for the same time and resources and you are forced to balance.
The act of balancing is deciding how to manage tradeoffs. The only way you can manage tradeoffs is to know yourself and make decisions based on a set of core values. If you don’t do that then you will be out of balance and external forces will make decisions for you. When that happens you will be unhappy, because the balance in your life will run counter to the core values of your self.
“Family” or “Community” is an interesting aspect of this because it intersects with all of the areas of your life that you are trying to balance. At the core, you have your family – your parents, your spouses, your sisters and brothers and your children. These are core relationships that are important to you well being.
When you assess the balance on your life and try to align the necessary tradeoffs you have to look discretely at these core relationships because you are inextricably connected to them. When these relationships break or go bad they leave a gutted hole that is slow to heal and may never be more than scar tissue. These relationships require special attention.
I make it sound serious, because it can be. It can also be as simple as me wanting to change my diet but my wife has other ideas! There can be more friction in these core relationships because they are so closely tied to us. When you assess your life balance each of these core relationships needs special attention. Each of them is a project in itself.
Because there is so much friction and emotion tied up in these core relationships you might want to have a strategy for each one. Since, in some cases, you inherited these relationships you didn’t choose them, you may struggle to align them with your core self values. If these relationships don’t align with your core values you can buffer those parts and have a strategy to live with the parts that do.
For example, you may not agree with your Brother’s politics or life-view, but he’s still your Brother. You’re not going to change him and you’re not supposed to try. Unless he’s evil and dangerous you need a strategy to live with the parts of that relationship that are aligned with your core values and celebrate them. Don’t spend all your time and emotional energy brooding on the stuff you can’t and shouldn’t try to change.
Then there is the broader community. These are the communities we join in our pursuit of the other areas of our life balance. You have a community at work. You have a community with your running club, or your chess club or your Toastmasters club, or your book club, or your town meeting or your neighborhood.
Why do you have these communities? Why not just practice these elements of your life in seclusion? Why do we need to join? Because it is in our nature as humans. We know that we are social animals.
We need to commune with others. With other intellects with other souls. This cross pollination of communion is important to our mental health, to the quality of our lives and to the quality of our life’s journey.
The shared norms of community create the glue that enables civilization. They also control the aberrant behavior of those few broken individuals that walk among us. That’s why old people bemoan the loss of community norms – they see it as the crumbling of the foundation of society. Whenever horrific acts happen isn’t it always quoted, “He was a quiet guy, kind of a loner…”?
This creates more challenges and tradeoffs in trying to balance our lives, because these communities are not one-way relationships. When you join a community it is a proactive act of “joining”. When you ‘join’ with anything part of that thing becomes part of you and you become part of it. Give and take. That is the nature of community.
This is the challenge for you. This is the tradeoff. Because by joining the community you take on a responsibility to participate and to give part of yourself. These community commitments become another thing that wants 100% of your time! It’s another tradeoff.
If you manage your community commitments appropriately you can gain more from the relationships than you give. I’m not saying you become a ‘taker’ or a ‘user’ that preys on the energy of the community for your own profit.
This is important because many of the ‘self help’ gurus will tell you to end your old relationships that are holding you back and create new relationships with people who are more successful than you. In this way you can ‘climb’ the ladder of success.
Looking at relationships purely through the lens of how they can benefit you or your pocket seems overly mercenary to me and not a strategy to long term success, happiness or life balance. I’m saying that, like a good marriage, your relationship with the community should be synergistic in a way that both you and the community gain from the interaction. One plus one equals many.
The way you should assess these relationships and communities is how they align with your core values and how much synergy there is between the path you want to take in this world and the path they are cutting. Look for relationships where the benefit to both you and the community will be greater than the individual energies expended. And by ‘benefit’ I mean not just extrinsic but the whole ball of extrinsic and intrinsic benefit that can be the fruit of any relationship.
Let’s get practical. What direct action can you take out of this?
First, just proactively thinking about your relationships with individuals and communities will move the interactions out of your emotional dinosaur brain and into your big brain so you can be more rational in your tradeoff assessment when considering life balance decisions.
Second, take an inventory of all the relationships and communities you have. Which are the ones you are happy with? Which are the ones you are not? Which ones add value? Which ones drain value?
Third, for each of these in your inventory how do they align with your core values? Because, if they don’t then you need to adjust that.
Fourth, come up with a strategy for each relationship of how you are going to approach it. Look for opportunities to perhaps extract yourself from organizations or communities that align only marginally with your values or take too much from you.
Fifth, use some of that headroom that you have freed up by disengaging to find new communities that align with your values and with which you can create a synergistic relationship.
Life’s never going to be easy. It’s always about managing tradeoffs. That’s ok. It’s about how you manage those tradeoffs that will make you successful, happy and balanced.
No one can perfectly balance the tradeoffs. Your goal should be to do your best at managing the tradeoffs, because these tradeoffs, these points of interaction are where life happens and value is either created of destroyed.