Community
What we need is us
Journal: 12 January, 2025, morning.
Freshness is wonderful, isn’t it? The delighted surprise of seeing or reading something fresh, new, different, and all of that in a pleasing way. That’s the attraction in meeting someone new, someone who is captivating in what they say and do, and it’s all deliciously different, and immensely pleasurable. And we want that freshness to last and it never (hardly ever?) does because it becomes the status quo for that person and we grow accustomed to that being just who they are and maybe the enjoyment lingers and stays but the freshness is gone. If we are fortunate, the fresh pleasure just transforms into a more quiet and permanent enjoyment of them as a person, and that too is a wonderful thing, that continuing interest that we have in them, even though what they bring is predictable. Constancy is not necessarily a bad thing when it’s constancy of good things.
I’m thinking about the arc of relationships and what happens in those over time and how people come and go, especially here in this virtual community. Unmined richness it is, that potential of meeting people, the possible combinations in the “six degrees of separation.” Almost always it’s accidental: lovely serendipity when you encounter a kindred soul, maybe not so much in some situations where you just shake your head ruefully and move on.
What keeps us in each other’s orbits? We move in and out of regular contact and some people come and stay for a time and then leave, for no apparent reason, and some people come and just stay, and ten years later they are still there.
I regularly read my Facebook Memories because it’s interesting to see what was happening and what I shared five years ago, or ten, and part of the poignancy of that is the people who were there then but not now. Some (too many) left us, in that final exit from the party, and some just disappeared. Sometimes our interest wanes, or theirs does. Sometimes life just intervenes, activity is paused, attention moves elsewhere for a time, or for good.
Freshness. It’s amusing to think of this community as an unwrapped surprise package, every morning a new gift to open and exclaim over. You never know what’s going to be in that package. It could be Shakespeare. It could be that pink bunny suit. Is that what keeps us here? Maybe partly, but for me it’s much more the relationships. Otherwise I could just read the newspaper, right?
Complain as we do about this virtual community, I am convinced it’s the community part we love and keep coming back to, despite all the continuing changes and if you’re here, still, reading this, I’m glad. I take comfort in that, and I celebrate it. #community
#journalingalife