We all want community, but do we want to be uncomfortable to find it?
An exploration of what it actually takes to turn and idea into reality
Hello and welcome to The Art of Good Enough, a space of nature inspired art, gentle words and imperfect practice made to help us all build a more loving relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
We opened the Spring season with questions like:
How does conformity and comfort dissuade connection?
Where does Joy live in the every-day?
Where might aesthetic be replaced with authenticity?
How might your personal growth intertwine with communal growth?
Today, I invite you to explore what happens when we move from an idea—like the idea of community—to reality—actually finding and creating community.
I talk about how friction is inherent to this creative process (any creative process). Leave a comment and let me know: do you agree? disagree?
Enjoy.
With love, Kim
We all want community, but do we want to be uncomfortable to find it?
I don’t think I can go a whole week without hearing someone say, “ I long for community”. My friends want more community in their neighborhoods. Activists tout the necessity and resilience inherent to communal organizing. My coworkers want a school community that is stronger and more engaged. Community is the buzzword of the year, promising us a society where we know thy neighbor and reach out and support one another.
To me, growing deeper and more fulfilling communities sounds really nice in the way a dream feels really nice, before it encounters reality. In actuality, I think building community–or, as Sage Ajara of “With Love, Sage” prefers to say finding community– is a lot less dream-like and more labor intensive, time consuming and dare I say annoying.
Whereas the idea of community is a first draft, The Blank Page, unbeholden to any kind of syntax or structure, finding community leaves the realm of mess and flow and enters a new part of the creative process: friction.
In community we need friction to create anything real
It doesn’t matter how much you love writing or art or gardening, to move anything from an idea to something solid and final, we come in contact with friction. Gone is the state of perpetual flow, where how things fit together doesn’t really matter. Now, you are trying to create something that can stand solid and stable without you holding it up, or explaining the back story. The idea has left the womb and is making something of itself. We are beholden to the confines of reality.
Friction is annoying, frustrating, sometimes deeply uncomfortable. You come face to face with parts of yourself you didn’t realize had a stake in this idea and its outcome, had an opinion, a vulnerability, a dearly beloved process. All the while, what you want to create has its own rules too.
If you welcome the friction as part of the creation process, not an antithesis to it, friction can yield something new and something real.
The first draft is a doorway into realities that don’t yet exist. The second, the third, the final draft, are what happen when we choose to step through one of those doorways. Into the real world– with real people, with differences and needs and constraints. Friction is involved in anything we want to create (or find) including community.
In community the work is work
No community exists without a little bit of annoyance and discomfort. Community is showing up to events you maybe don’t want to show up to. It is engaging with people that maybe think differently than you and have ideas in contrast to your own.
Being in community means you are there for people when you might not have 100 percent to give, but you still show up as best you can. It means you might not want to do the thing, like driving 30 minutes and holding a sign in the snow, or going to that event after work, but you do it anyway because you know showing up matters. Showing up is how that community builds stronger and stronger roots.
Being in a community means your imposing on other people. Maybe, in the best way. It means showing up with a freezer meals that you made last night after dinner because you forgot you were going to see your friend’s new born baby the next day and the mom and dad definitely need freezer meals. Community is checking in daily on the elderly neighbor even if it might feel intrusive.
Ultimately, finding community and then growing with that community requires work and that work has friction. It impacts your time and your life and the things you want to do for yourself. It requires us to ask of others, and be on the receiving end of that asking. We will have to step out of our comfortable little bubble of home and family units and into the lives of others.
I am not saying that friction means give when you have absolutely no capacity to give, but if we are all sitting around waiting until finding and then tending to community feels convenient and like we are perfectly resourced and capable of offering something of ourselves to others, then we aren’t really positioning ourselves to actually create what we want.
Every writer knows that to write anything, you just have to keep showing up day after day. And while in our heads the process is a serial state of flow, some days the reality is a lot more like banging your fingers harder and harder on the keyboard until one or two words stick.
Despite the difficulty, the outcome is no less worth it.
In community we are annoying (and annoyed)
Recently, there was a vote on my school district’s budget regarding an 8 million dollar budget cut. The lower budget unfortunately passed. While the passing of the lower budget, in my opinion, speaks more to how much the burden of funding public education falls on local taxpayers than anything, during the weeks leading up to the vote, the Teacher’s Union was worried about the amount of emails it was sending to its members calling for the community to stand in protest.
On a personal level, leading up to the vote, I was worried about inconveniencing my friends and family if I talked too much about this issue. If I shared the information too far. If I was too annoying asking again and again for people I know to come hold signs with me. Whereas the far right “tax cutters” who facilitated this budget cut have no problem being rude and invasive about their stance on education, those of us who thought differently were worried about slightly inconveniencing those around us.
Being in community is getting too many emails from your local teacher’s union to protest an amendment to the school’s budget. It is also being annoyed by the quantity of emails and being annoyed that you have to heed those emails and go out and protest.
Being in community is talking about something that really matters to you to your friends, family and coworkers. It is asking something of them–support–and letting it be okay that you need something from someone else.
In community we commune: You–yes you–must ask for help
We live in a hyper-individualist culture, that says you must rely on yourself at all costs. Do not ask of others. But, I know that we all dream of something different. More and more on social media, I see calls to be in community with others, but I see, myself included, a fear of actually putting ourselves out there enough to actually create that community.
If you are like me and have spent most of your life trying to avoid friction in your interactions, avoiding rejection and conflict and being in any way unpleasant to someone else, then being a bother is going to feel so foreign. Knocking on your neighbors door to ask if they want to come to a Saturday barbeque is going to feel uncomfortable. Checking in repeatedly on your elderly neighbor is going to feel like an intrusion. Bringing a bunch of freezer meals over to your friends house, might feel like you are assuming too much.
And yeah, holding a sign is boring. Making phone calls is boring. Showing up to that event is boring. And annoying. And inconvenient. But so is showing up to the page, to the artwork, to the garden, again and again even when it is a little hard.
What makes the second or third draft worth it, is that you can tangibly see what you are creating. Is it idyllic? No. Is it inconvenient sometimes? Yes. But, out of friction, we rub up against the wants and desires of other people, the real life constraints of connection.
And from that connection what we find and then grow has stronger roots. Has a face and a name. Has a life of its own.
In community our hands create something tangible
When we welcome friction into the process of finding and then tending to a community, we allow that community to become a visceral presence in our lives, which is what we all really want when we talk about community in the first place.
I hear so many people, especially right now, longing for a manner of living that is more connected with one another, but I think if that is what we need and want, then we have to let go of the idea that what is worth tending to, creating, finding, should just come to us without effort.
Let’s ditch the belief that worthwhile things must be comfortable, easy and pleasurable, for the belief that there is value in discomfort, and showing up when we don’t want to, and boredom. Because if real community, not the idea of community, is to exist then we must be there with our hands to sustain it. And that can never be, because it is real, only ever one thing.
So, make those phone calls and hold those signs. Ask your neighbor for help, or invite them over for dinner. Show up to the birthday parties and the book clubs and your friend’s house to wash dishes even if it feels a bit difficult or intrusive or annoying. Because if we want to leave the blank page of ideas for the story that has just begun, we need the friction of our lives lived together to do it.
More Spring Essays
Markets & Shop
Mayflower Market 5/10/25
Blooms on the Brook 5/14/25
Both of these are sponsored by Old Mill Coffee House in Chelmsford, MA.
Perfect start to my day, reading this. This paragraph in particular is an important reminder to those of us yearning for community: "Being in community means you are there for people when you might not have 100 percent to give...but you do it anyway because you know showing up matters." Thank you Kim.