A Mason's Work

There's a big difference between your feed and being fed.

When you look online at the stuff that's coming down the pike, that's all curated by

an algorithm which we very likely will know.

But there are people in the mix that generate some of that content and typically you would

refer to those as your community.

When you go to a lodge meeting or a community gathering of some sort, a parade or what

have you, it's important to remember that those are the real community.

The people around you and close to you, even in an online space where they may not be

geographically close to you, but they're familiar with you and you're polite and your

challenges, your questions, comments, concerns, cares, etc, etc.

They know you are enough about you in the context of the sort of special interest you

share that they would be remiss if you were unavailable.

If you got sick, they would note your absence and comment.

When we start talking about community development, it's important to understand that can mean

community in all of the various ways and places where community erupts or emerges or things

like that.

When you are out and about trying to curate or cultivate a sense of community involvement

and engagement, it's helpful to remember a couple of kind of key things.

First, almost every community that you're a part of is a decision.

You can participate or not participate in a community.

There is no one holding you to it.

If you find that the nature of a community is not productive for your mental health, don't

participate.

I know that's difficult in some cases.

Let's say you live in an area and the community that you're living in in that area is not

ideal.

Moving may not be an immediate option.

Being general, the nature of how you participate in a community or participation at all is discretionary.

When you start to move into the communities of choice, those places where you want to engage,

and the internet offers a ton of great stuff here.

The communities of special interests, communities of hobbies, communities where you are commonly

sharing a similar hardship, these are all great places to meaningfully participate.

When you go out and participate, remember those engagements are almost identical to meeting

people in real life.

They're just like meeting your neighbor.

The amount of sincerity and honesty and integrity and vulnerability you can bring to those

engagements in the large moving pieces or kind of large moving concepts is productive.

Now that said, when you're participating online, there is risks.

Those risks are significant.

There are people out there, there are bad actors, there are folks that are participating

and not participating in a way that's designed to profit themselves and to the detriment of

others.

Keep your discernment at the same time.

Your communications and relationships online as well as locally will be best served by taking

a one-to-one approach with the people you're participating with.

When I go to my neighbor's house, I ask them how they're doing.

I ask them if they need anything.

The same thing is true.

I don't presume my neighbor needs something a different neighbor needs.

I don't presume that I know what's best for all of my neighbors all at once.

The best choice when it comes to managing your focus in those conversations is to treat

every interaction as an interaction with an individual.

Community emerges from the collective sort of culture that happens during those interactions.

There's other aspects of community we can talk to you, but for now, it's sufficient to

say you're going to cultivate and grow any community that you participate in through one-to-one

interactions with those people.

Even when the community is assembled, even if you had an online meet-up or if you had

a local meet-up of a community, you're still willing to be able to talk to one person

at a time.

If you're doing a public address, that's not really what's going to help do things like

relationship development.

The relationship development and therefore the community development is going to emerge

from the individual one-to-one interactions with the people in the room.

What that means is when you start to really cultivate community and try and drive performance

in any organization like your lodge, like your civic group, like any of the, especially

interest groups you are participating in online, those one-to-one interactions are the key.

Now, when you are in regular life, just like inside your communities out in regular life,

there are very likely folks that you may not really get along well with.

In regular life, you just kind of don't hang out with those people.

Same thing is true in a community.

You don't have to engage with everybody.

You don't have to have those one-to-one relationships or conversations with every single member of

the community.

You can do that with the people you like.

Inside that, you're going to cultivate those relationships and strengthen the community.

The important sort of takeaway here with communities and the whole conversation around how do we

participate in those is one, it's volitional, two, it's always about relationships.

And three, the last piece is, it's the small acts of vulnerability.

As you've seen in some of the episodes we've recorded, a small acts of vulnerability, the

small acts of sharing and kindness between two individuals that strengthen those relationships.

It's not grandiose, you know, large donations to the community.

It's not any one of those things.

The individual interactions is where the community is meaningfully developed and grown.

So find someone to help see if you can cultivate that relationship and strengthen the communities

around you.

That's one of the things we're chartered to do in a sort of Masonic concept.

So go out and engage the individuals in your communities and see what you can do.