Happy Wednesday, everyone. (Did anyone else grow up calling it hump day? As in, the hump in the middle of the week? My parents did and I still have the term in my mind as a marker of where I am in my week. :>)
I started thinking about the communities that we have in our lives this morning – prompted by the realization that I have 3 communities that serve different purposes in my life. The mental wanderings started with thinking about support and love (of different kinds) and how I get those things from different people in my life. Communities and social networks are so critical to everyone’s well-being, I think. I see this in my research (I’ve used social network analysis in several research studies and it’s fascinating to see how other people generate and describe their networks), I see it in my life, and I see it in others’ lives.
Like I said, I have 3 communities:
- Family
- Work
- Blogging
My family includes my biological family of origin and my chosen family, which includes a random assortment of people who have been important in my life at various stages. (If you ever want to hear some interesting stories, ask people who they think of when you say the word, “family”. This was our network generator in several studies, and it’s absolutely fascinating!) My work family consists of a very small group of people whom I trust and rely on for help, support, and advice. There are people who are more senior to me, and one or two others who are at the same stage in their careers. And my blogging community includes, well, all of you. 🙂
NaBloPoMo reminds me of how much I value the community that I have found online in the past few years. I credit San for bringing us together each year, and I see the month as a celebration of the connections forged among a group of people with very different lives, who nonetheless have created a community with strong ties and mutual support. It’s a welcoming group, and an ever-evolving one.
I was wandering through a few books I own this morning, looking for a more philosophical take on community, when I came across A.C. Grayling’s description of love in his book, The Meaning of Things: “…the kinds of love that are most significant to us are not those that fill novels and cinema screens. They are instead those we have for family, friends, and comrades; for these are the loves that endure through the greater part of our lives, and give us our sense of self-worth, our stability, and the framework for our other relationships.”
I hope you all get to enjoy some time with your communities this week. <3
Communities are interesting for sure; I spent some time in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina and was very interested in the chaos that she wreaked due to the fact that many neighborhoods were made up of entire families and had been there for several generations, so having one neighborhood get destroyed meant that the entire community was displaced/dispersed. Literally people/families had been next door neighbors for decades or sometimes over a hundred years. What a disaster!
The blogging community is such a nice way to make friends with a commonality, but from all walks of life. You really get into the meat of things a lot faster than you may do in real life, and that creates fast friends, well, fast! I don’t do NBPM but I do like checking in on you guys to see how you are all doing!
It is interesting to see how events can disrupt communities, isn’t it? That loss can make it so much harder for people to weather major traumas, like Katrina. The benefits of coming together and sharing experiences and just processing loss can be so powerful – and it’s so hard when people are scattered to the wind. Sorry, getting philosophical in my comment reply. 😉
And yes, the blogging community is amazing – thinking of how such a geographically dispersed group of very diverse individuals somehow comes together and finds, well, community is just fascinating!
I talked to an anthropologist once about interviewing people. She said that the best things to interview people about are food (food traditions) and family. And she’s right! If you’re every stymied about talking to someone, just start asking them questions about those things and you’ll be more likely to get something interesting out of them instead of asking about work or whatever.
Happy Thanksgiving Eve! May your long weekend be restful and fun!
Asking about work is the worst! I dislike it when people start off with that, because how is that the most interesting thing about someone? Families – how they are born and made – are just fascinating in general… it’s one reason I build family into my research, to be honest.
I hope you enjoy a fabulous Thanksgiving, too. I’m solo but happy for a day to not do nearly as much work and to maybe catch up on some blogs. <3
I feel like I’ve been super lucky with family – everyone who lives close enough to gather with regularly is wonderful. Also with friends – we moved to where we live now just before we had kids, and met a group through my husband’s work at the same stage of life, and now those seventeen people are basically my second family. With work before I got married? Not so much. The work I do now? Much better. And my blogging community, better than I ever could have imagined it. I’m grateful for all of it.
So many amazing communities – friends, family, created family, work… and blogging, of course! I like to think of all the different things we all get from our various communities. 🙂
Yes, huge credit to San for bringing us together. I absolutely love our blogging community, and the friends I’ve met through NaBloPoMo each year. I agree, a sense of community is really important to our well-being, and the research bears this out.
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
San is such a connector, isn’t she? We are so lucky to have her – and each other. Seeing others’ posts and reminding myself that I Am Not The Only One, Thanks is really important… keeps me from being ridiculously self-centered and (at times) negative. 🙂
Aww, thank you guys… but I am only a small part of why this community works <3
Ahem. Beg to differ, thanks. You are a BIG reason why this community works – and works so well. <3
Community is so important! I have family, work, friends (book club), and blogging as my communities, and they are all so very important to me.
And yes to hump day! Do you remember the hump day commercial from way back when? “Guess what day it is?!” I always think of that camel walking through the office when I think about hump day, lol.
You do have a lot of communities – and I bet they are important for very different reasons (and that they provide you with different things).
Ha! I forgot about that commercial! That was hilarious.
Sometimes I say happy Wednesday to my parents by texting happy and then the camel emoji. 🙂
Most of my community is far away and I don’t get to see them often enough.. but as I recently mentioned on Elisabeth blog: I might not have a strong local community because I don’t put the effort in because all my needs for connection and friendship are mostly met in our blogging community these days. Of course I’d love to meet for a cup of coffee with many of you in person, if it was possible. I think the transition from URL to IRL would be so easy. Sigh. A girl can dream.
Someone needs to figure out how we can apparate like in the Harry Potter books. It would be so easy, I think, so shift from online to in person. Particularly in this community that you have built! I can’t quite figure it out – we are all so different, and yet we get along so well, and see ourselves in the others’ experiences.
Sigh. Wanna move to Wisconsin? 🙂