Round and round it goes

Belonging is a complicated topic on any day.

I have written about it here and here and many other places. Clearly, this is an issue that takes up space for me, and usually it is tied to my semi-nomadic beginnings as a young adult, and the fact that I survived by deliberately not quite fitting in.

This weekend, I was prompted to think about it differently: what is my community? Who are my people? Who do I really care about? And, by extension, who really cares about me?

Because at the most basic level, belonging is about love. The kind of love that anchors you and keeps your sane. And that kind of love is about people, not places. It is about community.

Of course, it used to be that most people stayed in more or less the same place. That is no longer really the case. Nowadays, more and more people are on the move, for good, bad, and downright ugly reasons. Communities are fluid and more like networks of connections than fully defined closed circles. (This is definitely not an original thought: I remember reading about this “trend” for my freshman sociology seminar back in the 80s).

I think I hadn’t thought about what this means for me: for my circles of community, of belongings, of love. And I definitely hadn’t thought about what it means for the work I feel called to do.

Who do I care about, and who cares about me? These feel like deeply exposing and uncomfortable questions that I will be pondering for a while.