'I Forget What' by Chantale Doyle
What is community?
Or more specifically, is community a location or an action? Is it a geographically organized grouping of humans, buildings, infrastructure, goods and services? Or is it an invisible ‘place-less’ set of behaviors that lives within each of us, and is characterized by how we interact with each other?
Is community a noun, or a verb?
Perhaps we don’t think enough about the specifics of community. We pay it a lot of lip service as a general idea, but we don’t have a collective agreement around what community is, where it is, when it is, or how it is. Therefore, we don’t really know if it’s a noun, a verb or something else altogether.
So I’ll put a stake in the ground: I think community is a verb.
An example:
My Joshua Tree friend Chantale Doyle broke her leg this week. Not one of those minor, I’ll-be-in-a-cast-for-a-few-weeks breaks, but a serious one. She had surgery, she won’t be able to drive for many months, and she needs a lot of care right now.
Chantale is smart, interesting, brave, and super-talented. She’s an artist, and she runs the coolest retail store and hangout in town Mt. Fuji General Store. And (yes, there’s more!) she’s a chef who hosts an incredibly popular, roving “secret” dinner party called Bistro Escondido.
Chantale is a friend, but she’s also someone I’m in community with. We’re both in Joshua Tree (at least some of the time), but that geographical fact isn’t why we’re in community. Chantale and I are in community because she has repeatedly drawn me into her world.
Chantale has a knack for community. She knows how to foster it: how to motivate, how to have fun, how to give back, and how to inspire. She’s at the center of a loose collective of creative people who share geographic proximity, progressive values, and a pioneering spirit. And she has welcomed me into this collective – this community — often enough that I feel part of it. I feel valued within it. I feel responsible to it.
I went to visit Chantale yesterday, and she asked me to bring her some magazines. (She knows I’m a magazine junkie, and she’s a junkie too. We’ve often laughed about the piles of unread, partially-read, and dog-earred magazines scattered throughout our respective houses.) It was a simple thing. Easy to do. I was happy to comply. In a heartbeat. A no-brainer. She’s asked others in our community for things, too. Specific things that make sense given who we are, and our role in the community. We’re all happy to help. It goes without saying.
And yet, it’s the saying that matters. Chantale is very good at defining her needs and asking for help in getting them met. She understands the give-and-take of community. She understands that she can ‘take’ from a community as readily as she gives. And that ‘taking’ is not asking for a favor. It’s not charity. It’s just part of being in community. It is a communal behavior. A behavior that I’m admittedly quite bad at. I rarely know when, why or how to ask for help from my communities. And when I do manage to figure it out, I still end up feeling like I’m imposing on them, rather than engaging with them.
So, if community is a verb, a set of behaviors that an individual performs as part of a group, how do we know how to act in community? Do some people just have a knack for it? (like Chantale) Do we learn it at school? At home? Among friends? Is it instinctive? Did we know how to do it back in the day (caveman times), and not so much now? And most important, if we’re bad at various aspects of it (like I am), can we get better with practice?
Perhaps our communal behaviors need to be codified. Let’s take them from vague instincts to universally understood and accepted patterns. We know how to read, ride a bike, Tweet and grow tomatoes. Let’s also know how to be communal.
I think FarmVille’s community-building prompt is genius as it codifies community as a ‘give and take’ behavior in just the way I’m talking about:
Stephanie Smith sent a request using FarmVille: Here is a Chicken for your farm in FarmVille. Could you help me by sending a gift back?
Nothing could be simpler… here is a gift. You can help me by sending one back…
