RETIREMENT – COMMUNITY

My first sense of community came with being a minister’s daughter.  Born in Asheville in 1951, North Carolina, my dad started his career with three small rural churches in the villages of Weaverville and Leicester.  The church members became our community.  The country folk took us in, respected, and appreciated us.  Christmas brought us our first “pounding”.  Food.  And plenty of it.  We stored what we could in a shed out behind our hundred year old farmhouse, aka parsonage.  When the shed blew up for some unknown reason, the church members came to our rescue.  We became family to some of them.  Like Miss Annie, whose little white, vine covered farmhouse harbored smells of fresh yeast rolls, homemade butter and jam, and fond memories.

Over the years I gradually grew away from the church, though it served as our family’s community for many years.  After I married, my former husband and I helped create a food co-op in Boone, North Carolina.  Then that group of people became my community.  We cooked and preserved food together, had regular meetings, built our homes together, went through pregnancy and early child rearing together.  That was forty four years ago and I am still in touch with some of the women in that group.

When my son started kindergarten, I started nursing school.  In each nursing job over my thirty two year career, my coworkers became my community.  (The same was true for my fellow massage school students, some of whom I still hear from.)  The strange thing was that the more involved I became in nursing, the less time I had for my outside community.  There were (and, thankfully, still are) friends and occasional gatherings, but mostly, for me, there was nothing left to give at the end of my workday.  And that leads me to the next piece of the puzzle of me.

Scarcity.  Defined as “not enough resources…to satisfy or fulfill the wants and needs that every person has”.  For me those resources were/are time, money, and smarts.  I became a “jack of all trades, master of none” because I was constantly moving from one project to the next without really mastering any of them.  Growing up in an atmosphere of scarcity played itself out in the continuous struggle with nothing ever being quite good enough, and more importantly, not giving time to family and friends because there was always so much I had to do.  I developed what some would call ADHD.  So as I sank into my career, eventually adding massage school, Healing Touch certification,  and aromatherapy training, always aiming for self-improvement, to the exclusion of the one thing I needed most…community.

One definition calls community “the shared attributes of the people in it and…the strength of the connections among them” or “the feeling of some sense of belonging or interpersonal connection”.  Searching online for more definitions of community, I came across an article called “The Only Metric Of Success That Really Matters Is The One We Ignore” by Jenny Anderson that takes it farther.  Through the experience of her brother’s life and death, Ms. Anderson came to an understanding of what she believes community truly is, and I quote: ” …Community is about a series of small choices and everyday actions:  how to spend a Saturday, what to do when a neighbor falls ill, how to make time when there is none (my emphasis).  Knowing others and being known; investing in somewhere instead of trying to be everywhere.  Communities are built, like Legos, one brick at a time.”

For many of us the sense of connection with each other has been declining, thanks partly to Facebook and Instagram.  We stay in touch, but we lack human touch, contact.  We need coffee with a friend, conversation on the bus (without devices!), to soothe our social souls.  Research shows that those with weak human contact have a 50% likelihood of dying at a younger age (Holt-Lunstad/2010).  Loneliness pervades our society.  We crave belonging.  “It’s necessary to give to others, so that they will in turn give to us,” quotes Anderson.  Community, she says, is “an insurance policy against life’s cruelty; a kind of immunity against loss and disappointment and rage.”  In these incredibly stressful times, this makes even more sense.

So here I sit in Ajijic, Mexico, in a small gated community of twelve homes, in the midst of a pandemic, wondering how to create community when I’m told I may only go out for essentials.  Wearing a mask and keeping my distance.  Fearful of what contact with “the wrong person” might result in.  But retirement and lockdown have given me the time (and I’ve taken it!) to ponder, to review my life, and this time community is my priority.  I hope the friendships we touched on our first year here will survive this overwhelming test.  Meanwhile, love your neighbor!