Successful Relationships Reading Corner
This week, we wrote about how relationships and community fulfill the same need for connection. 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.”