I've been thinking the last couple of days about solitude and about community and about how hard it is to find the appropriate balance between them.
This weekend, I felt like I couldn't make up my mind whether I wanted to be alone curled up in the chair in my bedroom without even music as company or surrounded by people being noisy and silly. One moment I would be happily devouring a book, the next I would be tossing it on my bed, bored and disgusted. One second I would be bantering with friends, the next I would have the strongest urge to stand up, walk out, climb in my car and drive away.
I think I have always had problems being with people. It's not that I don't love it. I really do love being around people. I am a true extrovert. Usually it is exciting and satisfying to meet someone new. So I don't mean to give the impression that I suffer my way through every social gathering. I don't. I just mean that there has always been a little twinge of anxiety along with that excitement. Unless I know people very well, I feel a little exposed spending time with them. So that feeling, that social claustrophobia that makes me want to scamper away to a place of solitude, that feeling is familiar to me. The difficulty with solitude, however, is relatively new to me. Growing up, I was good at being alone. I read a lot. I wrote. I climbed trees. I imagined. Part of my adeptness with solitude was built out of necessity. I went to a private school that had very serious problems with cliques and those mean little, non-physical forms of bullying and exclusion. I didn't choose my solitude in those days and sometimes I chafed against it. Still, overall, I think I took the situation and made the best of it. And what I made of it was good. I think it led to my self-reflective nature. It certainly nurtured imaginative and artistic stores that I might not have excercised without it. I used to be good at being alone. I don't think I'm so good at it now.
Community is great. Finding it is thrilling. I first found it in college. I joined it willingly, but now looking back at it, I don't think I gave myself to it completely. I never let myself need it. When Resonate started, that changed. For the first time, I was being told that community was about more than my own entertainment. That it was more than just my sense of belonging on the line; it was not just social, it was spiritual. The Bible doesn't give community as an option. It is not just one possible way in which you can follow Jesus. It is the only context given for being a follower. We are told to "Bear one anothers burdens, and, in this way, fulfill the law of Christ." Community is about fulfilling the law of Christ and it was going to take more than I had given it before.
I was reading through some of my old journals last night. I found this. I wrote it just after Resonate had its preview service. The newness of this kind of community was obviously on my mind at the time.
"Lord, because you are trustworthy, I will continue to trust those around me. Because you know me fully, I will let myself be known. Because you made yourself vulnerable, I will too. Because you showed me what love is, because you command me to love, I will throw my heart into the fray."
It's funny to realize and to remember how hopeful and scared I was about making that commitment to live in community with others. It seems so natural now--a good deal less scary, but also a good deal less romantic. I had one idea about what the dangers of community would be at the beginning. I know now that the dangers of community are different than I had supposed. Yes, of course there is the danger of people you trust failing you. I've seen it happen. I've had it happen in small (but no less painful for their smallness) ways. What I didn't realize was how living in community could begin to make you need to live in community. It's a little bit like a drug. Once you have it, you begin to need it. That's not a perfect analogy, of course, because living in community is neither as interesting or as damaging as drug use. But it does bring you to a place where you start to expect regular interactions with a group of people on a certain level of intimacy, and when that gets interrupted, for whatever reason, it can be. . . uncomfortable.
Maybe that is why I felt so claustrophobic this week. The claustrophobia around other people is just normal. It's a part of my nature and personality that decided to assert itself this week. It's a natural response. But the claustrophobia I felt by myself, the feeling that I was just so small and that the world was so small and the failure of all my usual standbys for passing time alone to satisfy me, maybe that was a conditioned response. Maybe it is the result of the past two years of consistenly (though certainly not perfectly) choosing to live in community to the extent that I began to not just like (sometimes I don't like it at all) but need that community.
I don't know. Just thoughts.
