Do you have a memory of a group or a community acting to do something that individuals, themselves, cannot do? For some people, they experience this in sports or in choir. If you’ve ever been to a highly anticipated game, you’ve experienced how an electric crowd heightens the ability of players, or causes them to make mistakes that they’d almost never make on their own. Or, perhaps you’ve experienced overtones—the phenomenon of singing a single note so perfectly that other harmonic notes can easily be heard. When this occurs, it’s usually with multiple singers, not a soloist.
One thing that is hard to do in our society is to figure out how to properly balance the significance of both the individual and community. You might put it this way. Many want to emphasize the importance and value of the individual, but when this is done, it’s easy to lose perspective on the importance of community and its influence over us. On the other hand, those who emphasize the importance of community can easily lose perspective of the importance of the individual. We, at Muuvwell, want to uphold the value of both community and the individual, so for the month of October, we are going to be talking about how community affects wellness.
For this week, we encourage you to think about what genuine community looks like, as well as the positive and negative experiences of community that you’ve had. The word “community” gets thrown around a lot, these days. You can get on Facebook and find “communities” for antique collectors or any number of hobbies or lifestyles. So, if those are genuine communities, it seems that all that’s needed to be part of a community is a shared interest and the ability to message others that share that interest. Is that all it takes to be a community?
We reckon that there is more to it than that. To this point, reports of feeling disconnected and isolated have been on the rise. According to the surgeon general’s advisory (https://www.hhs.gov/sites/
