Quality of Community
How can one qualify community? Without differing perspectives and ideas, without other’s examples for living, without dialogue we begin to petrify into a static state. We no longer seek to become, we just are. It’s an age old story that is on a loop. I say this, but have to add that others aren’t necessarily the answer to evolving our lives because we could easily surround ourselves with placaters. We are all seduced into entering a house of mirrors which only serves to form an echo chamber of ideas. This mineralizes in our lives and we become unmovable stones.
I believe the more resolute we are in what we “know” the less we know when we die. Being open to our own fallibility is an insecure plane to exist on, a plane of constantly knowing that we don’t know or will not know enough. When I was 20 years old, I knew truth far more than I do now. I was impenetrable to other ideas, I knew the absolute, the overarching, the objective Truth. Yes, I knew. But I didn’t. We want an amount of certainty in our lives to feel like we aren’t free falling through existence and we can grasp onto something substantial. But, there is a caveat to knowledge, it is a living thing. It will always expand and leave us more room to learn.
Enter others.
From others, from a community, we would hope to strive to surround ourselves with those that would challenge our ideas, not to be contrarian but because the pursuit of knowledge would be what both parties were engaged in finding. And it is the playing with ideas and the struggling back and forth of minds that has the potential to generate new knowledge.
When we settle into our nook into a society that soothes our ego, a social salve if you will, we become protective of it. It brings a sense of peace to the anxieties of life that every human will encounter. Unchallenged and happy.
I understand it, I’ve jumped back and forth many times, for it is a very seductive path to follow. The community can either affirm who you have been or it could be an impetus toward greater self and overall knowledge.