I love to assign specific mantras or sayings to certain chapters of my life.
Some of my favorites have been: “Life is random,” “I’m conducting research and collecting data,” “Will wonders never cease,” “You’re executing at a high level right now,” and now, my personal favorite: “Community is the greatest currency we have as humans.”
I have been thinking about community as currency quite a bit lately. I think about where, how, and why I constantly crave the feeling of being alone, but never lonely.
I want to always feel like I am part of something larger than myself — and perhaps as humans on this planet, we always are — but in a way that feels hallmarked by like-mindedness, or a common goal, or perhaps a shared ethos.
I recently returned to Yale, my alma mater, for our 2-years-late graduation walking ceremony. The ceremony was originally meant to take place in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic rerouted plans for that celebration. I felt stunned when I was there.
For me, passage of time often has a de-familiarizing affect on a place, like bumping into a former lover on the street after years of not talking. However, being on campus with my classmates felt familiar this time.
I hadn’t felt such community and camaraderie so saliently since I was last on campus 2 years prior. I hadn’t realized how valuable this feeling was until I realized that I have been subconsciously seeking it out in spaces, places, and people in my life ever since I had left.
Yale alum Marina Keegan (who walked at Yale 10 years before me in 2012) wrote an essay titled The Opposite of Loneliness, and it speaks to this invaluable feeling:
“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life... It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team.”
I have found that, time and time again, I enjoy myself the most not necessarily because of what I am doing, but rather who I am doing it with. Perhaps it is even just the fact alone that there are other folks in the act of “doing” alongside me, walking towards disparate goals, but in parallel directions.
I constantly crave the certain magic that lies in an experience transforming from one that is personal to one that is communal. I craved this same feeling when I founded The Mind Body Spirit Collective at the height of the global pandemic back in summer 2020.
My mental health was in a low place, and I had taken to pole dancing and yoga as a form of catharsis. I so deeply craved sharing these forms of healing and movement with others, so it made sense to create an online community space to learn, grow, and enjoy movement during a time where movement communities had halted in-person.
Like Marina Keegan wrote, I chased that feeling “that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together,” for one specific, certain reason during a very uncertain time.
I also believe that there is a beautiful impermanence to community as a currency. My community 5 years ago is not the community I have now, and the community I have now will not be the exact same community that I will have in 10 years.
Like all currencies, and even like our own dynamic selves, our communities are constantly changing, evolving, and fluctuating.
So with that, I hope you can go find and create your own currency — one that has nothing to do with money!