Community
I am sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant. About to get a bowl of pho. It’s rainy and cold and windy outside.
A good day to get pho.
I recorded a skit with my friend. It’s pretty bad. We also recorded a podcast.
I’m a bit bummed because he tuned me to the fact that the audio quality was not the best in our last podcast.
That bummed me out because our last podcast we interviewed a well known guy and there are more people than usual tuning in.
Damn. Is what I thought.
I’m not really sure what to think right now. The past week I’ve been out of sorts.
Yesterday my parents had the pickleball tournament they’ve been meticulously planning for the past few months.
It went well. I think.
A lot of there friends were there. But by friends I don’t know. Maybe just people they’ve known a long time. With some people they’ve met more recently.
Are they friends? Maybe they are family? Maybe they are… I’m not sure… paired together through a mix of emotional, financial, and pseudo situational circumstances.
Community. My parent’s community. I think that is maybe a better way to put it. And… for a long time I thought that was an artificial fake thing but the more I mature I think it is less artificial and more “man-made”.
Because a community doesn’t just happen. It requires work. And it can be impaired and strengthen. And it’s complex.
Social relationships are complex. At times very complex.
I would say that is what yesterday was.
A meeting of a web of complexly related individuals, groups, families, companies, organizations, etc..
I think that’s one reason why I’ve been struggling to define what my parents and grandpa are trying to accomplish.
On the surface they are building an apartment building to benefit themselves.
But if you go a level deeper they are building the physical representation of their life’s work.
Something that represents my grandpa and family’s complex relationships to the wider place that’s shaped the family. Something to give meaning to the deeply invisible forces that have made them, them. That’s made us, us.
They are building a monument to their identity. Something that says, “hey, I was here and it mattered.”.
That is what they are building.
And for a long time I thought that was dumb. To a certain degree I still do think that.
But after yesterday that started to shift. The shift started before yesterday. Perhaps it’s been happening for months. Perhaps years.
But this thing they are doing is something deeply emotional. And it’s not just about them. It’s about meaning. It’s the building of a church.
It’s not religious but it is spiritual. And it’s deeply and extremely complex.
And complexity is hard to express.