Should it get lonely at the top? We all grew up in a community that always had our backs, our parents, siblings, and other family members were always around, friends and neighbors visited us frequently . We knew our neighbors and almost everyone around the block. At school, we had our classmates who, with time turned into friends easing the transition from home to being away from home. We always belonged to a community.
We got older, got jobs and had to move out of our parents' house and even relocate, and then everything changed. All of a sudden, we were away in a new community, away from our loved ones, closest friends, and everyone we knew. This is when you begin to understand that you are in control of future, this is when your priorities changed from simply existing to thriving . It really doesn’t help that, as we get older it becomes even harder to maintain friendships and other relationships due to work or business schedules and other demands. It almost feels like one doesn’t have the time, throw in the location factor, a shift in and beliefs, not to mention fewer opportunities to meet new people.
I recall learning that, in the past, people used to knock on neighbors' doors to ask for a cup of sugar, not because they didn't have any at home (although occasionally they really needed the sugar), they did it as one way of fortifying and fostering a sense of community. A way of communicating “I depend on you; you can also depend on me”
As time passes, it becomes increasingly apparent that individuals, both consciously and unconsciously, move toward a hyper-individualist culture (Wiktionary: a tendency for people to act in a highly individual way, without regard to society). There seems to be a lot of rules too preventing people from developing healthy relationships with people around them. For instance, we have all heard the “you can’t be friends with your coworkers” Although some of these rules make sense to some extent, they remove a sense of belonging to a community.
Social media can be held partially responsible for this propensity to distance oneself from a community. Social media has a way of making people feel a sense of belonging to a community, which makes them shun actual social groups in their community. People can be on Facebook or Twitter, greeting and texting strangers from other cities or countries, but they can't even take the time to say hello to the person they're sitting next to on a bus. It's the standard nowadays to not know your neighbor, and some even gloat about it, despite the fact that neighbors are the ones closer to you in proximity than your friends or relatives.
Today, remember how it felt to be welcomed into a new neighborhood by a group of friendly neighbors, or how comfortable it felt to know that others had your back even though they were strangers to you. Let us remind each other that being a community does not require much; let us learn and educate each other on how to be a community once again.
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