Definition of Community
Senior Jude Rutter delivered the following message in Chapel this week.
When I was asked to write an essay on community last year, I did what any desperate student with a blank Google Doc would; I looked it up. I turned to Merriam-Webster to get an expert’s opinion, and found 3 main definitions and 12 subdefinitions. I read through each one and thought, “Oh, but it’s more than just that, isn’t it?”
Community has a giddy ring to it–that omnipotent term for you and me and us and we and all. It’s capable of describing intimate feelings like the comfort of a familiar street as well as the vast networks connecting people around the world who, if not for their shared love of dogs, or skiing, or video games, or sushi, would otherwise never connect and meet. It carries something reminiscent of nostalgic memories of your childhood town, ones you look upon fondly. Yet it’s still so much more than that.
It is what ties humanity together–an invisible string that binds all–and although some community bonds are stronger than others, any group of people is bound together by community in one way or another. Community itself is a spectrum. Realizing and unlocking the community between us, regardless of how perceivably minimal, may be the first step of making a place more welcoming to everyone.
Communities can be assembled in so many ways; through shared history, through mutual interests, cultural values, common goals, or even just through location. At its core, however, community is built through shared experience. The scale of these experiences can range from great tragedies or triumphs to mundane interactions we deem ordinary. It could be surviving a natural disaster together, sharing a worry about a test next block, greeting the crossing guard every morning, or forming an inside joke. Community is built by the nanometer, word by word and glance by glance. Every human interaction amplifies its giddy ring, allowing community to unfold unpredictably and spontaneously through repeated interactions and experiences over time, regardless of the scale. Each moment creates a sense of recognition and relation even if it’s minute.
I have seen this most clearly in places where community is not something formally organized. In Cambodia, where I have spent much of my life, it can emerge from the smallest and least remarkable interactions: a village dog that seems to recognize you before you recognize it, an elderly man who greets you like an old friend the first time you meet, a neighbor who breaks the language barrier by miming out their intention. The people and places that become familiar don’t always announce themselves as communities. They just accumulate around us until one day we realize that we belong to something we never consciously decided to join.
Still, it could be easy to dismiss this sentiment about community as ignorantly optimistic. If you’ve ever felt harmed by your community, or felt like you’ve been reduced to a role within your community, you may not see the notion of community as a universal good. It may seem hollow or contingent on transactional experiences. Is this phenomenon, though, an effect of community or an effect of a lack thereof?
When we reduce our relationships with one another to our roles, such as student-student or student-teacher, we fall too far from egalitarian and spontaneous connection and reach not community but an imitation of it. At times, what looks like a problem of community is actually the opposite–we’ve forgone the human-to-human connection that true community is reliant upon, and need to work together to create and embrace it.
Other times, the harm in community comes from one’s exclusion from it. Our strongest communities are sometimes our smallest, like a group chat or tight-knit friend group, and for observers, it may seem impossible to become a part of said community. Many of us know this well, likely as both excluders and excluded. Yet, within such a scenario is an opportunity for community to blossom. A small but potent community provides the perfect foundation to sprout into something greater and form a more overarching web of connection.
Perhaps these concrete terms like “formed” or “assembled” don’t exactly tell the whole story. Community can often be a value unrecognized but still present; we don’t always seek to actively create communities, but at some point, we realize we are already a part of them.
Our unique identities–composed of our gender, our ethnicity, our beliefs–are profoundly important. In the greater web of community, they are the distinct, colorful strands of each thread that represent the individual. Sometimes, though, we can allow these wonderful distinctions to place walls between us. We can become so invested in our differences that we fail to notice the invisible netting connecting each and every one of us, intertwined by the natural experiences of human life.
We have our differences, but our similarities are overwhelmingly plentiful in comparison, and honoring our individual identities doesn’t mean foregoing those similarities. As humans, we all understand what it means to feel joy, to feel grief, to feel surprise, despair, love, disgust, excitement, anger, fear, relief–you name it. As humans, we’ve all undergone the pleasant coziness of acceptance and the painful sorrow of exclusion or alienation. We have all, at some point, been the stranger, the insider, the outsider, the person who waved first, or the person who didn’t wave back.
If community is built around shared experiences, then there’s so much more of it to be discovered. Maybe community is not something we need to construct so much as something we need to learn to recognize. The invisible string is already there, running between us; the netting has already begun to form. Every conversation, every shared joke, every familiar face, every moment of kindness, each one adds another thread.
Only once we choose to recognize these shared roots of ours can we plant the seed of our tree, bearing a bountiful efflorescence of unrevealed similarities we have by simply being human, coming abloom above us like flowers. And perhaps that is community’s giddy ring: the sound of realizing, one small interaction at a time, how much of us was already shared.
