Pathwalking 107
We form communities because it is human nature to not want to be alone.
What do communities form around? It is usually a common element – everyone shares a skin color or similar beliefs about nature or a faith in god or a common activity and so forth. The people find common ground with one another, and form a group that shares that commonality. Now we are not alone.
The trouble is, while this starts off innocuously enough, often communities depart from their inclusionary origins to become exclusionary. Sometimes this goes the way of isolation. Sometimes this causes the original community to splinter and subdivide. Sometimes this goes to the point where the community seeks to actively destroy those who do not share what they have with one another.
The togetherness that community creates among people can be a very good thing. It is human nature to seek out companions, whether blood or lovers or friends, and forming a community is one way to do this. One issue that often occurs is with community comes conformity.
Our society as a whole is all about conforming. Those in power certainly don’t want free thinkers breaking the mold that they have worked so hard to gain control of. However, you need to just look around you when you are standing in a crowded room or on the streets of any major city to recognize that one size does NOT fit all.
While we may all conform into various aspects of any given community, we are still individuals. As much as we sometimes like to sink into the downy softness of the blanket of community, we cannot and should not deny our individuality. Or worse, we should not attempt to destroy individuality in ourselves or in others.
Pathwalking is about embracing my own uniqueness. It is my journey every day to discover, explore, and enjoy my own personal path in life. The overriding goal of this is to find happiness with who I am in this world.
There are days when this is really really hard. Even amongst the communities I count myself a part of, there are times I very much feel the outsider. I feel no matter how much I try to belong, I do not.
When I was younger, I used to change who I was, how I acted, what I did in order to best be accepted by the community I wanted to be included in. I would act in a manner I believed the other members of the community wanted me to. I would hold my tongue, alter my trajectory and do whatever it took to be embraced within the community.
More than once I reinvented myself. In some instances this was due to a complete change of venue for my life. In some, it was a matter of seeing that who I had become was not making me happy. I still found that I was more concerned about making myself into someone that other people would accept and welcome into their given community than the person I wanted to be.
I began Pathwalking as an abstract concept that I decided I needed to truly live. This has been a unique challenge. Some days are of course harder than others. Some days it is utterly and totally worthwhile.
I cannot escape my communities I am a part of. However, I can actively choose them. I can seek out communities that are open-minded, inclusionary, non-judgmental, but most importantly make feel confident that they will support my choices and who I am striving to be.
It is important to be aware. This awareness should extend to the communities you are a part of. Do they reinforce positive, constructive energies – or negative, destructive ones? As I have mentioned time and again, we get much further in this world by building, developing and growing than by destroying, hindering and stagnating.
If you are not part of a community that makes you feel comfortably at home, you can always move on. And more than that, you can always form your own community.
We are a community. Pathwalkers and the choices we make often feel very alone in our non-conformity. However, as cliché as it may seem, we have each other. Together, we are a community, mutually supporting one another and our individual paths, journeys and goals.
Beyond these microcosms we form and call our communities, remember that underneath it all, no matter our race, our creed, our color of skin, our gender, our nationality, our religion, our ethnicity, our sexual orientation and every other divide we create amongst ourselves – we are all one. Every one of us is connected by the indestructible energy of the whole universe.
No matter our individuality or our associations, we are all one very large, very diverse and interconnected community of energy beings.
Even when you are feeling loneliest, you are not alone.
This is the one-hundred seventh entry in my series. These weekly posts are specifically about walking along the path of life, and my desire to make a difference in this world along the way. Thank you for joining me.
The first year of Pathwalking is available in print and for your Kindle.
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