for when you've soured on community
the remedy, i think? mutuality
Last Sunday, I went to a yoga class. Which, in and of itself, is unremarkable for a lady of my age and Allbirds-wearing station. It was the groupy-ness of the endeavor that surprised me, me who’s been going around telling people how she’s “soured on community.”
It’s hard to know if the souring is age-related; I do hope there is more love for hermitting on the horizon. An 84-year old friend emails me that he is no longer traveling for work, and I wonder if it is too soon to make a similar declaration. I am in the mood to make more declarations.
I suspect the souring is more likely parenting-related; when asked why I no longer attend church on Sundays, I mumble something about getting enough community under my roof the other six days. On a noontime walk with Rush around the neighborhood, I go so far as to blurt, “I’m over this interdependence thing.”
The irony is laughable to me, that as I’m growing older and arguably needier of care and concern and Other People, I am likewise growing fiercer and arguably surer in my desire for aloneness and enoughness and My People. So less community, you might say, and more mutuality. I am very into mutuality these days.
Mutuality is not the same thing as community, I don’t think. It is not community for community’s sake. It is not forced, not crippling, not the vestiges of a theology that says “If you love being alone, then people are what you need.” Mutuality is not a lesson. It is not a concept. It is consensual. It is chemistry. Like holy kismet.
Mutuality is showing up for your first yoga class at a new studio and finding your name scrawled in purple marker on a white board— “Welcome, Erin!”— as if they were as eager to meet you as you were to meet them.
Mutuality is meeting Yolanda, Yoli for short, who you remember from the sober dance party last October, who wore a flower crown and a unitard you’ve been coveting ever since. When you tell her you remember the unitard, she says, “Can I hug you?”
Mutuality is an R&B playlist. A temple massage with CBD oil. A University of Michigan mug on the counter. What luck, another northerner! Mutuality is thanking your body for bodying with others, against some odds.
I tell my friend Janell about my new souring season. “I’m not trying to become an irritable elder or anything,” I say, speaking from the confines of a parked card, the only place I can phone in peace on the weekends. “But I’m tired of obligatory people.”
“Erin,” she says. “I am not concerned.”
(I adore people who find me unconcerning.)
She goes on, “I am not concerned your life is going to become small or that you will, like, stop taking risks. And, in fact, I have found that when I remove myself from obligatory people, I actually have energy for the relationships I most want and need.”
I thank her for her witness. I tell her I can’t remove myself from all obligatory people. (So many of these wise philosophies fall apart for me when it comes to parenting.) But I can keep seeking relationships that seek me back. I can draw the circle smaller for once, parroting facilitator Priya Parker to say, “It’s not personal. It’s purposeful.”
One of my favorite bits from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is when she asks her budding naturalists if nature loves them back. They look puzzled. But Kimmerer persists. Why devote your life to something that’s not devoted to you? I think about this question a lot these days with writing, with friendship, with God.
So, this will be my devotion. To choose my obligations carefully (and accept the obligations I can no longer choose). To untether, as much as humanly and humanely possible, from the social shoulds (while acknowledging that some shoulds still turn out pretty good.) To seek the heat of mutuality, in myself and on the mat.
Which, I suppose, is exactly what we mean when we say “Namaste.”
XO,
Erin
P.S. Are you signed up for Priya Parker’s monthly newsletter on the Art of Gathering? It’s one of my favorites.
P.P.S. Tell me you’ve read the almost canonical by now Braiding Sweetgrass. If not, put it in your “books to savor” queue.
P.P.P.S. How are you seeking (or noticing) the heat of mutuality in your life? I’d love to hear in the comments.
This is resonant and so well-said. I'm struck that much of what you describe is what I've always thought of as my personal brand of "community for moody introverts" (like me.) Less obligation. More situational high-fives.
I am going to be thinking a lot about this distinction between community for community sake and mutuality. For me, there is respect in mutuality for all the ways one might be sad, quiet, over it, needing things that are not necessarily company, or even proximity. Sometimes community is overwhelming and boring and irritating, but I find that there is a spiritual practice in the obligation, too. So chewing on that part of your wandering and wondering here.