Sometimes it’s time to change
A major revelation occurred while sick with the flu recently. First time ill with influenza in many, many years, and I was vaccinated, too. During my illness and recovery, however, insights emerged for me to understand and now share. Have struggled in recent years with the idea of living in an intentional community. Struggled with the pros and cons of people choosing cooperative living. Grew up in a conventional nuclear family. Much of my adult life, however, was spent living in intentional communities of one kind or another, and also with others in quasi-or-semi-intentional communities. I’d placed high value on sharing resources, minimizing individual space, minimizing expenses, supporting each other in living the lives we chose, and all the joys and life lessons from living cooperatively with other people. ICs made economic, environmental, and ecological sense. One learned and improved skills in effective communication and conflict resolution. Such communities were a great cure for loneliness and a wonderful place both to raise children and to age in grace. People had the freedom to explore and practice living alternative lifestyles such as polyamory. They provided a network for spontaneous social interaction of a kind rapidly disappearing from our fractured, mobile, technologically-focused civilization.
As time went on, however, I’ve come to view such communities as a burden driven primarily by rarely-expressed financial necessity but cloaked under frequently-expressed ideological justifications. I had grown tired over ideological requirements over politics, religions, money, power, ownership of real estate, personal properties, diets, nudity versus clothed, children, nonviolence versus being armed for self-defense, healthcare, and on and on. Tired of squabbles over playing music, watching TV, being on computers, and how the kitchen is used. Did someone forget to turn on the fan when cooking oily foods or garlic and onions? Who left all these dirty dishes piled up in the sink and a mess on the table? Why leave your laundry in the wash when you didn’t have time to complete the process or ask someone else to do so for you? Oh, so now you’re gonna disappear into your bedroom to text someone you only know thru social media and watch TV? And then all our bedrooms are turned into mini-apartments.
For me, speaking and writing for myself, I grew tired of all the fuss. For me, intentional community had morphed into another reminder of financial distress. IC turned into yet another layer of rules and idealistic, often unenforceable agreements. Living in IC meant endless meetings. Often a greater value, right or wrong, was placed on sharing our truths and our feelings of the moment instead of generating plans for specific measurable results to accomplish projects and tasks. Privacy, which I once considered silly and overrated, became more and more important for me. Privacy emerged as a hidden or infrequently openly acknowledged value. Cooperation began to feel coerced by subtle unspoken assumptions, rules pushed by dominant personalities or larger stakeholders, and socio-cultural pressures. The more our planet and our country fractured into more and more violence, the more I was ready to use violence for self-defense and not live in some New Agey “peace & love & blessings” neotribe who believe believing in peace and mentally projecting imagined white light will protect them from violent aggression.
The realization I had is this: I do not want to live in an intentional community any more, AND I do want good neighbors.
Yes, I do not care what politics, diets, and religions my neighbors follow as much as we’re all here for each other when the need arises. Good neighbors means we at least wave hello as we pass one another, we can stop to swap vegetables from our gardens, and may sometimes share stories from our different lives. Good neighbors means my family and I are welcoming and help out, too, as we live the practice of being good neighbors unto others.
To be clear, I am not opposed to intentional communities per se or to people choosing to do so, but in my own way my priorities have changed. As if I’ve outgrown what was once crucially important to me for so much of my past. Time to move on, to move forward. Time to change.
Yes, no longer do I wish to live “intentionally” with others in a collective, but I do want good neighbors.
William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 28 February 2024
Revised Friday 1 March 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
United States of America
Planet Earth
Copyright © 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.