The Health of A Village

Community is the process of projecting the health and safety of others upon your own well-being.

Once upon a time, there was a village of sixty residents. Everyone was a neighbor—but that didn’t mean everyone liked each other. Some people were great to be around, and others were total assholes. However, every resident of the village knew that losing a single one of their neighbors would be a blow to their small world. People came as they are, and whether affable or insulting, no villager wanted to see the suffering or death of someone around them.

This natural affinity for good may have been based on a small bit of altruism, but it mostly came out of the basic logical conclusion that if someone in the village is suffering or dying, something must be wrong with the village as a whole. If a neighbor was diseased, will others? Will I? If a neighbor broke their leg hunting for game, will others? Will I? If a neighbor stole from another, will others steal, and will they steal from me? The health and safety of one neighbor intuitively foretold the health and safety of another.

Driven as they are to ensure health and safety, the villagers used the lessons of their neighbor’s maladies to learn what may be done to prevent the situation from happening again. They shared advice and recommendations with each other, which some took seriously and others ignored. Nevertheless, it was important enough of an issue to get some portion of the village in the same room to figure a way forward. The village sought to become whole again after a moment of loss and suffering, so they talked it out.

This story has no conclusion because a community has no end game. The village residents don’t hold on to a utopian vision of themselves, so they don’t institute mandates on how the village should “run”. There is no pretension about how people should be, so they attend to health and safety recognizing people as they are. Some participate and some don’t; others give and take advice and others do their own thing.

Knowing that there is no one right way to live, the villager appreciates that they were able to discuss it with those that cared, and hopefully the community as a whole will be a little more prepared for the next time. Community is the process of projecting the health and safety of others upon your own well-being. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us! Not a state but a process, community depends on never-ending changes in personalities, interpersonal connections, outside influences, and the state of the natural ecosystems that might have given rise to the community in the first place.