Welcome to Week 5 of the Summer Challenge!
From the French, comunité meaning commonness and the Latin communauté meaning fellowship, courtesy and affability, a sense of community today hasn’t changed much. It’s about getting along, sharing in common achievements, caring and belonging.
This weekend Burlington, VT hosted the amazing DragonHeart dragon boat races to raise money and awareness for a cure for cancer. It’s a great athletic event infused with creativity, perseverance, inclusion, laughter, straight up silliness, healthy competition, friendship, and hope. Where else can you get all that in one place?
Good behavior begets good behavior. Though we’ve all been known to behave badly at times, at our core, we are kind people always striving to do our best. I really believe that. This is how we got to the trophy generation, feeling all souls are inherently good and just need to be told so repeatedly in order to live a good life. There is truth in that and, of course, like all things American, we might have gone too far with our “you’re special” mantra. If we’re all special and the center of the universe (which David McCullough Jr. points out is physically impossible), we forget to take care of our neighbor, to do the right thing and to be there in times of need. After all, who needs help when you’re special and already have a hundred trophies for putting one foot in front of the other?
Making community connections allows for several healthy opportunities that just might be the antidote to the beef we have with our trophy generation blunders — tried and true lessons making a come-back.
Being together, striving for a common good, bolsters our self-esteem in the helping realm. If you came into the community feeling at all down (not special and not seemingly capable of offering anything worthwhile to anyone), you will certainly leave feeling imbued with the good you couldn’t help but preform while participating. If you came in feeling good, take care because you could be catapulted to a drug-free euphoria! Indeed, this is the exciting thing about our generation of Millennials. Because they are special, they actually believe in their ability to help and they do it. Far more than GenXers and Baby Boomers in fact (see M-Factor by Lancaster and Stillman). What once was the lady’s auxiliary is now a plethora of cool hipster troops “chill-axin'” for the good of the cause.
Being together helps us understand each other better so when behaving badly does happen down the road, we all have more context, more forgiveness and stronger, more meaningful ways of problem solving. Every time we interact with others we get better at it. No matter the baseline. By contrast, isolation and loneliness take years off people’s lives and throw social skills under the bus.
When we look at cures for depression neither drugs nor medical intervention top the list. No, indeed the magic bullet is getting out and socializing. Compound that beauty of an outcome with feeling good about how you’ve helped someone and how you’ve contributed to solving the world’s problems… enough said.
Making new friends doesn’t hurt either. The more quality relationships we have, the longer we live. Making friends in the context of healthy communities, healthy events puts you in a position to continue to be healthy, do healthy, crave healthy.
I always feel like I’m going to live forever because I work with school employees who are the most amazing kind of volunteers in the world. Between serving them every day and my family and friends, I’m immortal!
Send us your pictures (on Facebook) of your exploits in community connections this week and make the immortal leap! Imagine all the cool things we could do together.
See you on the PATH Ahead