Day 30: What's Next?

I’ve got to tell you. I have looked at this blank page for way too long. Even forming the words “What’s next?” has gotten my brain spinning off into a million different directions. What is next for your community or mine? After a month of leaning into it, taking small steps, and choosing to connect, what happens after that?

I wish I knew. Oh, how I wish I could lay out a blueprint for how to help communities come together despite our challenges, for us to be able to be truly helpful to each other when our needs are so varied and often so overwhelming. I don’t know what life is going to look in my community in one week, so how can I know what steps to take to make it stronger?

Every part of these past months have reminded me of the early stages of parenting a newborn. Being stuck inside, everything being so much more complicated with so many more considerations, isolation and loneliness, and most of all, uncertainty. If, when the twins were born, you had asked me how I would ever potty train two toddlers at the same time, I would have stared at you wide-eyed and said, “I hadn’t even thought of that. Oh no.” But it turned out that the same values that help with early parenting – patience, flexibility, humor – helped with the toddler years too.

In the same way, these community values – generosity, appreciation, forbearance, self-care, etc. – are not context-specific. They apply no matter what’s going on. So when I think of what’s next, it helps me to remember that if I keep fostering these connections, I’ll know what needs doing. I won’t be able to ignore it. And with each small choice to build a community I’ll do more than just meet the future as it comes, I’ll be preparing for it by making sure that the people in my life know that we’ll have each other’s backs, no matter what.

So what’s next for you in community? How can you take just one step today to build or strengthen a connection?