What is community? I often think about this and have thought about it for months, if not years. Is it the friends you grow up with, or is it your family who you cannot live without? Is it the stranger from halfway across the world you write letters to? Is it the friend of your friend who does not seem like a stranger simply because the vastness of the common ground between them and you is immeasurable? Is it a field full of daisies, acres on end, going on and on, burgeoning like a grassland on the advent of spring? Is it all of them, or none of them, or some absurd combination of everything you experience as a person? I would not know. I am a mere person, and these are questions far beyond my pay grade. The answers to these are found at the end of a life or at the end of understanding, both of which I am impossibly removed and away from. To be a living, breathing person is to have a dearth of answers. We are alive in the mundane confusion, the ever-present, effervescent cluelessness that gurgles and fades like waves on the beach. The human experience has many parts to it, but the not knowing, the erroneous is the largest one. It is not the ability to think, but the ability to err that makes us human.
But there are a few things I do know. I know that the laughter is real no matter where it is, no matter who is there to listen to it, and all I know is that hope, care and concern are found in myriad ways, unpredictable and often surprising. I know that to sit by yourself is often a choice and rarely a necessity, and I know often it is that the absence of something is simply a distorted view of being within it, that a person among people can feel alone merely because they cannot see the picture like a cat in some old painting does not know the scene it so wonderfully adorns, and that once they leave, which they must, and once they look at it all from the outside, which is easier to do, they learn that what they sought was around them, too, and that, they can rest easy that wherever they are, it is there too. I know all this, and I also know something else, that a breath of fresh air does many things, but the most important thing it does is make you look.