Community

There Are Many Ways to Come Together

What teachers know about community, time, and awkward beginnings

Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash

Listen to "There Are Many Ways to Come Together"

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“Sadness takes time. Sadness
is made up of minutes. Hope
is made up of years.

All the days can feel
terrifying. Until you realize
you’ve done this before.

Do you remember where you
were last May? I do. You were
here. You were alive.”

~Victoria Chang

I write a lot about the importance of community, connection, and relationships, of listening closely to each other, especially to children, and of learning to take better care of each other. I write about our interconnectedness and interdependence, and about how we might get better at establishing these bonds, even among seeming strangers or those far from the immediate reach of our daily lives.

Yet, people who know me well off the page also know that I’m pretty introverted in real life. I’ll choose a quiet day at home over a busy day out in the world whenever possible. I was most content and balanced during the years when I was working primarily from home. And there are approximately five people, at most, who can successfully convince me to go to a party. So there’s always a certain tension for me in understanding the significance of community, while also being a person who naturally pulls back from community to some extent—at least from community that takes the very public, social, gregarious form we often most readily associate with the word.

Maybe this is you, too. Maybe you hear all these calls for building community and getting offline and meeting your neighbors, not to mention all the warnings about social isolation, and you worry that this means you're doing something wrong or that you won’t be able to make a difference from your quiet corner. If you don’t naturally gravitate to gatherings of new people or derive energy from a crowded room, it can be difficult to see yourself in the paradigm examples of community building that most easily come to mind. But we can widen the paradigm.

Charlie Brown and Snoopy under the covers. Charlie Brown says, "I'm staying in bed, Snoopy. It's too peopley out there." — *I've always related to Charlie Brown here. Sometimes it's just too peopley!*

Or maybe you're one of the social butterflies, who craves company and is constantly trying to gather others, and it drives you a little crazy when you can’t get your quiet friends to come along for the ride. Whichever end of the spectrum feels most like home to you, it's easy to equate the importance of community with gregariousness and social fluidity. And it’s easy to get the impression that community connections should take shape in a flash. If we don't feel the balm of belonging the moment we convene, we must not be doing this community thing right.

But, like love-at-first-site clichés, I think we often equate being in community with an instant relief from loneliness and a ready-made camaraderie that just isn’t matched by reality much of the time. People are more varied, more complicated, and often busier than this assumption allows. As a result, when we see examples of well-established community and don’t recognize it right away as a mirror of our own experience, we might presume it’s impossible for us to replicate where we are—that the people showing up together must exist in some magical realm of enlightened collectivism that’s not available to us. Alternatively, for those actively trying to build community where it hasn’t previously existed, perhaps, as Garrett Bucks suggests, it feels deflating to extend an invitation and then have a small showing or have those who come feel more awkward and disconnected than you’d imagined.

But, here’s the thing—and, as a teacher, this is probably the only time I will ever give this particular advice—I think we all need to lower the bar for ourselves and for each other. If we actually want to build connections that nourish and last, we can't expect transformation to occur the moment we begin to build something new, at least not for everyone in the room. Expecting belonging to materialize easily, instantly, and widely can make us impatient. And impatience is kryptonite for strong relationships.

As a teacher, I spent years building little, cohesive, cooperative micro-communities within the walls of my classroom, and let me tell you, strong communities take time to establish and are defined, especially at the beginning, as much by the awkward moments and ruptures, as by the easy, exuberant, fun experiences of connection and synergy. Lots of things go wrong in the course of coming together. Blocks tumble, feelings are hurt, paint spills. It can all be a bit of a mess.

Years of classroom life have also taught me that community is hardest to establish when there isn’t a diverse array of temperament styles in the room. If everyone is boisterous and eager to participate, it’s difficult for anyone to get a word in or to hear each other. And if everyone is quiet and reserved, it’s challenging to spark the collective energy that moves belonging and engagement forward.

Building a cohesive, collaborative community in the classroom often takes months. Sure, some school years are magic and it seems to happen almost immediately. But in other years it can feel like it’s only as we’re about to disperse in the spring that the collective spirit finally coheres. In most years, it’s somewhere in between. As children become increasingly familiar with each other’s individual talents, preferences, and struggles over time, they learn to work together and to draw upon each other’s strengths with growing ease. They learn which friend to solicit when a new, out-of-the-box idea is needed and whom to rely on when cooperation and flexibility are critical. They learn each other’s humor and can recognize which jokes will register with which peers. They learn how to protect and comfort one another. And they learn how to share ideas. The louder voices become more patient listeners, and the quieter voices become more confident in speaking out. All of this takes patience, perseverance, and a high threshold for forgiveness and for trying again.

And here’s the other thing about school, it would be easy to assume that children are just naturally better at all of this—that they have an easier time rebounding from disagreements and tolerating the uncomfortable or the unknown. Perhaps this is true to some extent. Children are immersed in a constant process of encountering new experiences and learning how to do things they don’t yet know how to do. So, to a degree, they have a greater familiarity with persisting through the unfamiliar or frustrating moments in life than adults do. But, as we sometimes seem to forget, we also require children to go to school and to keep going to school, even when it’s awkward or frustrating or really, really hard. They have to keep showing up.

As adults, we may feel that we’re often doing things we’d rather not do, but we still have exponentially more choice in our day-to-day lives than children do. We can leave the party when we’re not having a good time or stay later than planned when it’s going well. We can make our own guest lists and set our own bedtimes. We can decide to try something new or we can decide to stay home. We have a lot more freedom in the communities we create and in those we choose to join.

So, as a teacher, I never expected a community to arrive at my classroom door fully formed or fully invested in one another. I never expected children to know how to work together or expected them to enjoy every moment, especially at the beginning. In fact, I expected that it would take time and effort to build connections, that there would be plenty of high moments but also lots of setbacks. I expected that not everyone would get along equally well, even once we’d learned to function relatively smoothly and happily together. And I expected that they would need help when difficulty and disagreement arose. In the early days of a new school year, I marked success through the smallest glimmers of budding friendships, the little gestures of repair offered when harm had been done, a willingness, on the part of the most reluctant participants, to return each morning with slightly more ease and trust than the day before, and a growing desire, among those for whom social connection came easily, to act as ambassadors and reach out with reassurance to the more tentative.

I was at an organizing event in New York a few months ago, as the ICE surge in Minnesota was just beginning to draw down. And a theme of conversation there was that we simply don’t have, and probably can’t build, the kinds of deeply connected neighborhood bonds that had been so powerfully on display in Minnesota, here in New York. New York is a bigger and more complex city, and the culture is less intimate and less known for warmth. I do believe that a version of New York Nice exists here, but its texture is surely different, and it isn’t the ethos that defines our reputation beyond our bridges, or even among one another.

But scale can obscure detail. Walk through Central Park on a warm day, and you will see hundreds of gatherings, not only of people who know each other well, but also the small moments, when one group starts to weave into another, as conversations spill over or balls are caught and returned to strangers' children.

As another example, when my elderly neighbor fell inside her apartment a few years ago, the residents of at least four neighboring apartments came together to figure out how to get her door open, while we waited for EMS, so the fire department wouldn’t break it down when they arrived. Since then, we are all more likely to talk to each other when we pass in the hall or on the sidewalk.

These small moments matter. They accumulate and establish “relational tissue,” as the organizer and community builder, Dushaw Hocket, says.

Just like those early classroom days, events where everyone feels a little awkward and maybe grumbles a bit can still be the beginning of something less awkward and grumbly. And not everyone has to do the same things or engage in the same way to be of value or to establish a sense of belonging. We just have to be willing to be threads in the web, connected meaningfully to a few other threads, in order to play an important role in holding the whole of the web together.

Throughout most of a classroom day, life consists of numerous small conversations and creations, as pairs of children are drawn to each other or to a particular task, and as clusters of kids begin to build off of each other's ideas and navigate through disagreements. Not everything that matters happens in the biggest, loudest cohorts. And yet, all these little clusters do come together in the moments when we need the whole group to gather. In time, through many smaller interactions, children learn to see themselves as part of something bigger—a class, a school, a neighborhood, a city.

Community and belonging don’t develop instantly, for children or adults, no matter how gregarious you might be. They don’t require everyone to engage in the same way or even in the same task. They don't require everyone to show up every time. And they can be full of discomfort and frustration and still, ultimately, become forces for growing connection and care. In the classroom, it’s often the small wins that give teachers the most assurance that the collective energy is moving in the right direction—a conversation between unlikely friends, a sincere apology, a typically quiet voice rising up and holding the attention of more exuberant peers for a few minutes, or one student noticing another’s need and offering to help.

If we practice looking with the eyes of a teacher for these little glimpses of connection in our own daily lives, we might just find that community is more abundant and available to all of us than we’d realized.

Wishing you the patience to let small sparks grow,

Alicia

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