In a world hell-bent on celebrating our ability to go it alone, I wanna shout out everyone who is moving beyond creating a life just for themselves - those who are leaning into making a life connected more to each other. To make it on our own, is a strong belief in the world I came up in. While individuality is a value we hold dear at our collective, true independence is beautifully bound with individuals cooperating to create the future, and the now. Sometimes individuality can be conflated with independence, just as sovereignty can be with solitude. With as many influences in our lives pointing to our wildly opposing places of separation and difference, I wonder if it would do us well to spend a bit more time considering our dependence on one another. I depend on my neighbors Scott and Maria to keep being neighborly. I depend on my colleagues to keep upholding a lofty vision for community-building and client-loving. I depend on the wisdom of our elders who are teaching me lessons from the land and history. I depend on mentors, coaches and teachers to continue helping me unravel blocks and blindspots that many of us were raised with - a mentality of competition over collaboration. I have been lucky enough to see, that over the years these beliefs have been proven to be pretty damn inefficient and unsustainable, compared to a route where community and relationships are the heartbeat, be it business or otherwise.
It's easy for us in our career to see how many individuals it takes to do our jobs and to do them well. We rely on a whole crew of folks who know how to love on houses and people. We rely on electricians, appraisers, photographers, makers, handy-guys and gals, we have painters, artists, designers, plumbers, and about a hundred more talented tradespeople, book nerds, full-on holistic house magicians and the list goes on. These circles of care ripple out into our neighborhoods and cities. When we slow down, we realize that we would not be able to survive without each other - in life, in business, in all of it. I’ve been chatting with one of our cityhome neighbors, Diego, with The Other Side Academy, we want to share their good work and mission with more folks; some neighbors are so easy to love. More to come on this one, but I will say in the meantime; when we listen to enough people's stories, and find out what really matters, one thing is becoming clear, when people talk about their version of home, it's never really a place. It’s a sense of belonging. And that is an inside job. While we share in this desire to belong, the ways we arrive there could not be more different. It is our inter-dependence and our one-off uniqueness that makes us wildly important in our communities, which crave diversity to survive. It us! Our differences makes us all valuable, and our togetherness and enthusiasm to celebrate each other, with each other, binds us. In the best ways. We come to rely on each other over time, and that will continue to help us make it in this world. Preaching to the choir here, I know. Let’s thrive, together, so we don’t fail, apart. The more diverse people we welcome into our awareness, the more likely we are to belong, in our bodies, our houses, and in our communities.
Seems to me that inter-dependence and independence are as bound together as this land, and you and me.
