Who shows up? Sometimes thirteen of us and we have to push together tables and apologize to other customers. Sometimes three of us, chatting quietly in a booth.
I don't always feel like showing up myself. (TBH, I rarely feel like doing anything at all.) That's where the standing appointment saves me from myself. Inevitably, once I'm eating my salad (just kidding, my burger) and discussing careers and kids, I'm happy I came. I just regularly forget to remember how happy I'll be in the future.
While scheduling a hangout far in advance laughs in the face of spontaneity, I'm not sure much spontaneity exists in the modern world anyway, or that it matters. What we really need are ironclad methods to strengthen human relationships despite our laziness, busyness, and disraction, so that we keep building community even when we don't feel like it or think we don't have time for it.
I struggle to show up sometimes. But when a no-way-out obligation is on the calendar, I'll show up.
In a beautiful essay in Quartz, Jenny Anderson writes about how painstaking this process of building connections really is. "Community is about a series of small choices and everyday actions: how to spend a Saturday, what to do when a neighbor falls ill, how to make time when there is none. Knowing others and being known; investing in somewhere instead of trying to be everywhere. Communities are built, like Legos, one brick at a time. There’s no hack."
Well, maybe there's one hack. Calendar the relationships you want to keep.
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