27. Growing Relationships: Building your village, Part 3
Sept 19, 2025
Back this week to thoughts on connections and building a village. I wrote last week about different types of work – work being an effort to achieve a purpose. I included connection work on the list of different types of work you may be undertaking or interested in undertaking. It may seem like a negative to think of your relationships as something you work on, but in my opinion, that is only because our language lazily associates the word “work” with getting paid; this is another example of how our language shapes our experience in the world. If we expand our thinking, as proposed in my last essay, to let the word “work” include all the types of activities you might undertake to achieve a purpose that you care about, then putting time and effort towards relationships to building a community around you makes perfect sense.
The way I see it, there are two types of connection work: caring and feeding of existing relationships and expansion into new relationships. Both lead to growth of your village. I’ll talk about the first type this week, and the second type next week. I’m deliberately not using the word “friend”. We have baggage tied up in that word. I think we are too stingy; we have rules in our head around what constitutes a “friend” or a “good friend” or a “close friend” that are honestly not useful to me currently, so I set it aside.
This week’s focus is caring and feeding of existing relationships. I like the image of caring and feeding, as in a plant or a sourdough starter, because it is something you do, not something you are. So, a movement idea, helping us to move forward. Caring and feeding your relationships is something you can decide to spend time on, to make an effort toward. It is not something that just happens, especially as we age.
When you are young, relationships are simpler to come by. Classmates, teammates, neighborhood kids, playgrounds, scouts, etc. – there are many places where kids get together. Whether or not you spend time with them outside of these activities, during those activities you are with other kids, socializing, talking, playing. As you get older, relationships do not sustain themselves as easily; some effort is needed.
Caring and feeding of existing relationships includes all the things you might already be doing – sending short updates or memes via text or WhatsApp, taking walks to catch up, meeting for coffee or wine. I’ll schedule zoom sessions or phone calls for friends who are farther away. The past few years I find I have fewer get-togethers with big groups of people; I find that after those types of gatherings I feel more depleted than revived and I may have only caught up with one or two people the whole night. Connection for me now takes a bit of intimacy, close engagement, listening, hearing.
I will say though, based on my experience, maintaining a connection does not require constant interactions. I do not have any type of regular schedule for engaging with my connections. With many of my connections, we go weeks, even months without checking in. Social media makes it easier to stay up with what is going on in each other’s lives. Mobile numbers and social media mean we are always only a message away from re-connecting. It used to be much harder to stay in touch and I appreciate now how easy it is to reach out to someone I have not connected with for a while.
In terms of deciding which relationships you care and feed, I suggest taking a very expansive view. It may include anyone and everyone you have listed on the contact section of your phone. The magic is – you get to decide! You have complete control over who you reach out to, which relationships you care and feed, and which relationships you respond to when others reach out. Let your feelings guide you. Let yourself be drawn into the idea of having this village of people around you. Who do you want in that village?
