Teju Ravilochan on Community and Redefining Wealth
Yes. We want you to attend our monthly Convenings so you can experience the relaxed and informative wisdom of featured speakers. Our Convenings are places where ideas create other ideas.
We also want you to say “Yes” to wherever you are when those Covenings occur.
How can we bring you closer to the Convenings? By sharing some of the thoughtful and idea-catalyzing words we heard. We kick these off with Teju Ravilochan. Teju is the Founder of GatherFor, working to transform neighborhoods into community-powered safety nets.
On Community
There's a line from Rumi, the poet, and he says that, "Your task is not merely to find love, but to seek and find all the barriers you have placed in your heart against it." And I love this insight.
I think my belief is, and maybe it's just my perspective, but that we come into this world very loving, like very willing to connect and that human beings, similarly on a larger scale, are really drawn to community.
Barriers originate from people who want to put them there; from people who sometimes are seeking power or seeking to protect or amplify their power or to protect the status quo may install an increasingly sophisticated ways, divisions and barriers between people to prevent them from coming together and uniting and speaking with one voice, which would be a threat to their power.
My belief is that community, the sacred and natural way of living, that we all care about and appreciate, is also threatening at times to our status quo and the systems and structures that are part of it.
If you're a one person in a community and you don't trust the people in that community to take care of you, one of your main options is to gain some kind of special advantage over those people and make them take care of you, force them, control them to take care of you. But the second that you do that you kind of hurt your chances of building a connected relationship with them and working together and trusting them.
On Redefining Wealth
On the other side of wealth are really just other people. What I mean is: what do we really need to meet our basic needs? We need other people.
Health is wholeness. So our health is not only our physical body's health, but it's our emotional health, our mental health, our spiritual health, um, it's our wellbeing, our sense of wellbeing.
So wealth provides for our wellbeing. To me, the measure of a community's wealth is in how effectively and deeply the people in the community have the experience of health, holistic wellbeing.
With GatherFor, when we start our engagements with these neighbor teams, among the first conversations that we have after people get to know each other, we do a native American practice called the PIES check-in physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual.
And we just say, look at each of these areas of your life, where are you? And where do you want to be?
Often in the work of development, community development, economic development, social entrepreneurship, social justice, we take a problem solving approach to things: what is the problem, and let us solve it.
Problem solving is about isolating variables. And typically we do that by understanding the cause, the needs, the observable undesirable phenomenon, what's driving this, what's causing this? Often, when we do then understand the cause of a problem, we eliminate that cause and that’s problem solving, right? If a disease is caused by a virus, kill the virus. If climate change is caused by carbon emissions, halt the emissions. That does make logical sense, but this problem solving lens makes a big assumption that we can and do arrive at causes. As is said in Buddhism, “all that arises has infinite causes and conditions.”
When you isolate a part of the body from the body, there is something profoundly sacred and essential to the way we observe that body part normally operating to its remaining in relationship with the body. So instead of trying to solve a problem by isolating variables and arriving at root causes, what does it look like when we approach challenges with the lens of relationship?
Perhaps the best way to solve problems is not to see them as problems to be solved and instead as something to cultivate a relationship with, to befriend. Indeed, in the space of friendship, we rarely are drawn to someone because of their ability to solve our lives problems, but more for their willingness to accompany us in all of life’s moments. Perhaps it is more vital we cultivate the capacity to accompany one another, to create belonging, than it is to hone our problem solving skills.
Community is this force that's capable of doing multiple things at the same time, of taking care of the wellbeing of many simultaneously.
In a really effective community where there is health, the community is operating in such a way that it takes seriously the concerns and the needs of each single person.
There is no numbering system, you know how you don't need to count the members of your family to know if someone is missing, you don't need to know that you just can tell because you know and care about every single human being in, in your family in the same way, the community is effective.
How do we measure if a relationship is good? How do we know if our relationship with our spouse or our parents or our children or our brothers or sisters or cousins are healthy? How do we know? Is there a metric? Is there some kind of. Number that tells us the answer. I think what we have to do is we communicate, we ask, “Hey, am I being a good friend? Am I being a good partner? Am I going to be a good child, a good parent.”
