Through our stories, through our trusted connections, within our safe communities, we build a space where we can belong. We layer these spaces up with our beliefs, with artefacts of membership, with their own vocabularies and unwritten rules.
As i’ve said elsewhere, membership, to some degree, always requires conformity: there are certain words, ideas or actions, behaviours that may cause you to be excluded.
But nothing stays still: ideas change, beliefs evolve, and the threads of connection that bind us can be stretched thin, or to breaking point.
But how do we view this change? As betrayal, or simply as wandering to a new part of the landscape?
Use your sixty seconds today to consider a relationship that has changed: is it broken or just different? Can you still see each other as companions on the journey, or have you become strangers to each other?
The forces that hold us together give us the connections that are inherently tied to our beliefs around identity and worth. Changing them can challenge both. But as Social Leaders we are compelled to recognise that the nature of connection is fluid, and our responsibility is not to stagnate it, but to observe, listen, and perhaps help reconnect it, albeit in a different space.
Day #207