The Complexities of People In Community
What I’ve learned about people from my own failings to build community.
Finding community and building community, both are hard.
For me the difficulty has always been finding others lacking in some way. After the initial high of a new group or project passes, once I’ve been working with certain individuals for a while, I begin to fixate on how the group doesn’t work as well as it could. I focus on the personality conflicts, the differences of opinion, the conflicting opinions and work styles. Eventually I get fed up with it all and disengage.
I was finding myself lacking and projecting my insecurities off onto others. I would become upset that I was unable to make people work together how I thought they should. I would be frustrated when things failed to unfurl as I imagined they. I failed to consider the vision of the people I was working with. The tapestry pattern that was our project was different to them than it was to me. I stuck to my pattern. It wouldn’t come together as quickly or easily as I hoped. So I would throw it away.
I’m only now, far later in my life than is reasonable, learning how flawed this approach is. And more importantly, that there are better ways. All systems are flawed. A group of people working together is flawed. Nature is flawed. We produce a tapestry with inconsistent colors and missed stitches. In the end it’s still functional and it’s beautiful. More beautiful than a tapestry made with machine precision.
I expected people to be like machines; efficient, but more importantly predictable. I expected them to share my ideas and my methods. When they didn’t, I became disillusioned with the work we were doing. I assumed it would fail. I was the one failing though, no one else.
I’m trying to do community differently now and for the first time it’s working. But I’m still haunted by those past failures. I’m up right now, at 2:00 am, writing the first draft of whatever this will be. I’m thinking about people, who at one time I felt had betrayed me, disappointed me, and realizing now that I really disappointed them. Good people who I decided were flawed so that I could walk away instead of doing the hard work.
I still have a long way to go. I have a lot of work to do. I often times feel stupid. Far behind where I should be at this stage in my life. I feel like I screwed everything up for so long. I sought community while sabotaging my every attempt.
Dwelling on these failures helps me work out these patterns. But dwelling only accomplishes so much and can be harmful when it leads to excessive self criticism. The compassion necessary for building community means showing compassion for myself too.
