Belonging

It’s a lovely feeling when you find where you belong. I don’t know that it happens to everyone, but it has happened to me. For years I have wandered around, looking for a neighborhood that might suit me – never quite made a match. I was starting to feel a feeling reminiscent to high school – that feeling that persuades you to hide in an art studio for the entirety of your senior year, shutting out mostly everyone around you. That was how I was starting to feel about my living situation. “Well” I thought, “maybe I can just go move deep into the woods and forget that there is such a thing as civilization”. But, alas, it didn’t have to be so. I have found my place. A neighborhood where the people around me are just the kind of people I find great comfort in being around – the kind of people that, too, probably hid in an art room the last year of high school.

Belonging is important to us humans, no? I think I ignored that fact for a long time. I think a lot of people ignore that fact. I know a lot of people that don’t even give it much thought. But I think it really becomes part of who we are when we find ourselves belonging to a larger community of people whom we can relate and communicate with. Maybe it’s a realization I only came to through age, but I am finding now that it is essential to my greater happiness. We are, inherently, a communal species I think. I am glad that I finally realized this about myself, it was starting to get to be a grumpy road I was walking. It makes all the difference in the world to have lovely people on my path to talk to and to be around.