Why being Part of a Community Matters

Building a Relationship is Invaluble

Today, is an era of seemingly endless digital connections, we have severely diluted the word ‘community’ into a meaningless online transaction....

Welcome everyone back to this week’s blog post, today as you may have guessed I am writing to you about community. Something extremely important to anyone’s life, including that of adopted children. Today we are apart of many groups you could call ‘communities,’ whether that is an online group, an email list, social media circles or any other form, yet these often lack the authenticity and depth of connections we truly desire.

Community, if we take a step back, is much more than just mere virtual interaction and convenience. Sometimes real community is far from convenient, but it truly is a necessity that many people are starved of today. We are increasingly heading to a world of aging populations, people are having less children, and a major problem for seniors in many countries (a prime example being China) is the lack of family and community to support them socially, and provide a deep meaningful connection.

Today we have all got on a train that takes us further and further away from in-person, close and relational communities. We are headed to a more sterile, isolated and desolate outcome, where society become more and more fake. We need to counteract these trends. We believe that community is for us, which it is, but, community is not going to arrive at our doorstep without us calling for it. We need to provide community for others as well. Other people need the sense of community you want. Many adopted people throughout history have struggled to find community, after becoming apart of a new family, community is just so complicated to find. Today, I would like to explore why community matters, and what we can do to address this growing isolation of the adopted, the elderly, the children and the adults of our time.

Value of community

Community obviously has value, for millennia people have opted to stay apart of their local community, their work community, their family community and their religious community as opposed to remaining alone. Remaining alone is extremely risky and many people who tried that technique did not survive. From Ancient Rome to Medieval Japan to the modern day Amazon, we had and have tightly knit communities, so much so that there are tribes in the Amazon jungle that are so tightly knit that they do not engage with the rest of the world, and yet they survive.

When I was younger I remember reading Asterix, a comic book series about a Gaulish tribe who have a potion that gives them super human strength to attack the Romans. I always viewed their isolated community as a prime example of full and true community (even though it is a cartoon), each person supports the other whenever they run into trouble, and they do run into trouble somehow in every story. That is just a fun way to look at community, but it sticks in my mind when I think of the communities we lack today.

There is no wonder that there is such a looming mental health catastrophe in our virtual, artificial, western lifestyle. After a pandemic which kept people at home the affects are clear. The social interaction, support and safety blanket as well as complimentary attitudes and complimentary skills that community provides are missing, and people are sometimes like those people who decided to live alone in the wilderness (except now it’s a virtual wilderness), an attractive but usually unsuccessful adventure. I think we need to return to engaging in our local communities, be that through school, sport, neighbours, church or our workplace. These places help provide belonging, identity and purpose, three things adopted children long for, but really they are things we all long for.

Community support and inclusivity

Community is essential for things I have already mentioned, social connection, health and belonging. One of my favourite days of the year is our church’s carol service. Almost every year, someone new from the local area comes for the first time, and gradually that is the start of a new friendship and an addition to the community. We need more times like this. When was the last time you took the initiative to go to a local event for the first time? If you have please continue! But, most of us are complacent to stay at home or be invisible at a big event like a concert. We’re really just starving ourselves. We want inclusivity, but we exclude ourselves, and maybe we exclude others.

Going forward

I believe that as adopted, unadopted or non-adopted we all need to find community, that is not just virtual but also in person. This could simply be through more interaction with those people you see every day as you leave your front door, with who you work with, or with who you do activities with. Or it could be through engaging in a new hobby and then you could invite friends to join you. There are so many possibilities, and with that I hope you enjoy the next week.