Last week a friend of mine was running on fumes. Her husband was out of town for a week, and she was home alone with her 20lb four month old and an energetic three (3)-year-old. I gave her a call to touch base with her to see how she was doing, and I could hear it in her voice: she was having a hard time. She never asked me for help because, like me, she is a person who has a hard time asking for help.
So I went over.
I want to be honest about what that actually looked like, because it wasn’t glamorous. I cleaned her kitchen. I made sure her three-year-old was fed and kept him occupied while she gave the baby a bath and got him dressed for bed. I didn’t get to sit down and catch up with her. I mostly showed up to be a second set of hands and to do what I could, which was just picking up after them and making sure she was ok.
I could have stayed home for a relaxing night with my dog, some udon noodles, and Parks and Rec. She never asked me to come, and she doesn’t expect this kind of thing from me. There was no event, no favor being repaid, nothing in it for me except knowing she wasn’t drowning alone for one more night.
That’s the part I keep coming back to: there was no return on this. And I think that’s exactly why it mattered.
We talk about community like it’s a nice-to-have
I think the word “community” gets thrown around a lot, as if it’s just something we should expect, something that should just be there. We put it in mission statements. We build curricula around it. We tell participants that the real value of a cohort isn’t the content; it’s the people.
But I don’t think we’re always honest about what community actually costs.
Community isn’t the Signal messages, the LinkedIn comment, the “thinking of you!” message sent from bed at 11pm, or the newsletters with everyone’s events. Those things aren’t nothing, but they’re the convenient version of showing up. The version that costs you thirty seconds and doesn’t touch your evening plans.
Living in a world that’s filled with instant gratification and 2-day shipping, everything we want and need is at our fingertips. But being in this fleshy meat sack we call a “body” hasn’t caught up to this idea of “instant.” Friendships take time to build, and relationships take time to cultivate. Sure, sometimes we immediately click with some people, but in order for those relationships to grow, we need to tend to them. Sometimes you have a rogue tomato plant you didn’t plant, but suddenly it’s growing like a weed in your backyard, but most gardens and most plants need time, effort, and attention.
Real community is inconvenient. It’s driving across town when you’re tired. It’s showing up to fold someone else’s laundry, mind someone else’s kid, sit in someone else’s mess with no guarantee you’ll ever need the favor returned and no expectation that you will.
What this means for how we build community at work
If you’re in a position to cultivate those relationships, cohorts, teams or gaggles, it’s worth asking: are you designing for convenience, or for the kind of showing-up that actually builds trust?
Convenient community looks like: a Slack channel, a quarterly mixer, an optional resource share. Useful but thin, and I get it; we are all at our wits’ end. Just busy with all of the things and the constant feeling of “THIS IS FINEEEEE, but also everything is LITERALLY and figuratively on fire.”
Inconvenient community looks like someone driving to a friend’s house because they know it’s a hard week. Someone staying an extra hour after a session, because a participant needed to talk. Someone showing up to something with nothing to gain, because they’ve decided the relationship is worth more than their evening.
You can’t mandate that kind of community. But you can model it, protect space for it, and stop treating “efficient” and “connected” as the same goal.
The ask
I don’t have the answers. Like most humans, I am flawed, but the one thing I do know is that humans are communal creatures. Some people want us to believe that, “I got here by pulling myself up by my bootstraps,” but the truth is that we had help; we had people supporting us.
I don’t have a tidy takeaway here, other than this: the next time showing up for someone costs you something, and there’s nothing in it for you, that’s usually a sign you should go anyway.
As things continue to get increasingly hot out there, figuratively and literally, we are stronger together. What’s the saying? “If you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together.”
