A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to you about the point of IRL community in a world where we could talk to anybody at anytime on any screen. My friend who posed the question also asked 2 other questions about the How:
Today I want to take a stab 🤺 at those two questions.
- What are the non-boring themes that hold humans together?
- How to build community in a new environment?
Let’s back up a bit. Community is an extension of friendship. And friendship is a kind of freedom.
It’s the freedom to be weird.
It’s the freedom to be as-I-am without worrying that you’re going to judge me or reject me.
(Aside: this is why there is a such a strong backlash against language policing of any kind!)
This is what I need to let my light shine. To do what Krishna did to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. To assume my true form, my shattered window into the overwhelming complexity of the divine.
Those little moments of humor or chaos or confusion or emotion are the hints to the multitudes we each contain.
Anyhow. I would propose the goal of a community-building exercise in your new neighborhood is to set yourselves up to be exposed to the unique weirdness (or “divine shard”) of each person.
In order to do that, we need two elements.
- We need some activity that brings out the weirdness.
- We need to feel safe.
The first is easy (cf “How you do anything is how you do everything”). You basically ask each person to do something small but important, ideally working with somebody else.
A party or dinner party contains myriad opportunities.
“Hey, would you two be willing to fill up these balloons with this helium tank?”
Lots of opportunities to be weird there!
“Here’s a juicer. Can you help my cousin Ginger to squeeze these 3 bags of limes for the margarita station. There is no party without margaritas, you know!”
Some people love standing around doing nothing and accosting people with stories about their life. But most people at a party with new people are very happy to carve out a little space with one or two other people. It’s less exposed and they know they’re doing something valuable. Those two elements of safety go a long way, and allow the participants to be vulnerable with each other in other ways, which is what you want.
Another way to help people feel safe is to tell them explicitly what you want out of them. Otherwise, we’re all wondering what we’re here to do and how we should be acting.
(Or we’re the tone-deaf guy endlessly accosting people and telling stories about our life.)
Here’s what I would do:
First, I’d get my kid(s) to make a hand-written card announcing my Housewarming Party and deliver it to every house in the neighborhood.
At the party, I would welcome/greet every person and give them a task. Especially in the early moments when few people are there, waaaaay better to be working with helium than standing around with no one to talk to.
Then, when Critical Mass was acheived, I would stand on a chair and tell people what I wanted:
“We just moved here and we wanted to meet everybody. We hope to get to know each of you for the unique, quirky, and briliiant individuals you all are over the next few years. Today is just the first flagstone in that path, but if I could learn something unexpected about each one of you, I would consider this party a smashing success.”
And then its just “Party On, Wayne.”
To go back to the original questions:
What are the non-boring themes that hold humans together?
Our shared desire to be seen as who we are, and to helped along in that process of self-discovery, which can only be accomplished in conditions of emotional and psychological safety.
How to build community in a new environment?
A. Our society actually has a pattern for that (for once): The Housewarming Party.
Two final notes:
- I wouldn’t invite my larger community to Housewarming Party I. I would wait until Housewarming Part II, and then invite the people I connected with most at Party I to go deeper and meet my larger community.
- For more on the role of co-creation and tasks in parties and dinner parties, check out my podcast episode on the Lao-Tzu dinner party. (link)
It’s cold in the Northern Hemisphere. We should all throw more parties.
Ankur Shah Delight: Community and Conflict 