What Is Community?

It’s hard to describe feelings and emotions. We, as humans, simply aren’t wired for it. Literally. Our limbic system, the part of our brain that handles emotion, doesn’t have strong direct pathways to the regions that produce language. There’s no fast wire between feeling something and finding the words for it. Yet, we are highly emotional creatures, and often driven by feeling. That’s why you’ll need to give me the benefit of the doubt as you read this. I’m going to do my best to put into words a lot of the feelings from yesterday.

But first, let’s take a brief detour to 2017. More specifically, May 2017. That’s when Recharge first opened. To spare you the math (if you’re reading this from our Recharge community, you’re welcome), that was 9 years ago. We had an idea, a really big idea, that we wanted to keep small. My co-founder at the time, Ryan Smith, and I wanted to redefine how healthcare was delivered to a local community.

As physical therapists, we felt perfectly positioned to expedite healthcare delivery and improve the overall health of our community, and more importantly, to do it in a proactive, ongoing way. Recharge was born to be a bridge, a connection between who people think they are or should be and the true potential of who they can be. The biggest pain point (no pun intended) for most is health. When we opened in May 2017, we began the journey of building that bridge with our first small group of members. 9 years later, we are no longer a small group of a few members. But our connection has nothing to do with the size of membership. It has everything to do with the connection through community.

What is community?

It comes back to a feeling.

I’ve thought about that question on and off for many years. Even in the early years of Recharge, when people would visit, they’d say there was “something,” a “feeling” they couldn’t describe. And this was from people who weren’t part of the community. But on some human level, they felt “it.”

Naturally, I looked at it from a scientific angle. You work out, and you release dopamine and other feel-good hormones. So, yeah, of course you’d “feel” something special. There’s also the group dynamic. We are social creatures and do better in social environments. But then what about introverts and people with trauma who struggle in other social settings but not here? You see how this can become an interesting puzzle to solve?

So I stopped trying to nail it down. At least with my head. I started paying attention to what was actually happening in front of me instead.

Yesterday gave me a lot to pay attention to.

It was our 9-year anniversary, and before the party, we marked it with Murph. If you’re not familiar, it’s a hero workout. Long, hard, and intentionally humbling, done in memory of Navy Lt. Michael Murphy. We do it every year.

I was coaching. When you’re in Murph, you can’t see anything but the floor and your next rep. When you’re coaching, you get to see the room.

And the room is what I want to tell you about. We had 3 heats of participants.

Each heat started with an introduction, logistics, and warm-ups. Then the workout began. The chatter from the warm-up had gone quiet. What replaced it was a sound I’ve come to recognize over 9 years. Not silence. Not really noise either. A kind of focused breath. The sound a room makes when everyone in it is working at the edge of what they can do, at the same time.

That’s when something hit me.

I want to say “pride,” but “pride” isn’t quite right. Pride is what you feel when something you built works. This was different. Quieter. Closer to the feeling of watching what you helped start become something that no longer needs you to hold it up.

The room wasn’t mine anymore. And it hadn’t been for a while.

These were our people, doing their thing, in a space we opened 9 years ago without fully knowing what we were opening. The biggest realization was that it wasn’t people that I saw. It was each person. I knew each person. I knew the struggle they wrestled with in that moment. I knew how someone was dealing with stress from a renovation currently happening. I knew the sorrow someone was navigating from a loss in the family. I knew of various aches and pains that some were persevering through. They are a collection of lives and experiences. And when put together, they are all multipliers.

The lean

I keep coming back to that puzzle. What is it that people feel when they walk in here? I still don’t think I can nail it down. But I think it has something to do with the fact that none of this is performed. The care isn’t a value statement on a wall, and it isn’t a slogan in our marketing. It’s just what happens here. What the room does when nobody is watching.

And maybe that’s part of the answer. Maybe community isn’t something you can describe directly because it’s not really a thing at all. It’s a pattern of small moments that, over the years, stack up into a feeling you can’t quite explain to someone who hasn’t been in the middle of it. It’s about the willingness to lean into moments. The “feel” is the intuitive sense that, if needed, you can lean into the community, and it will hold you up.

The human element

What I felt yesterday was the cumulative weight of all of that. 9 years of small moments, all stacked into one room, on one morning. There is beauty in the daily struggle. Like a challenging workout, it’s not always pretty. Sometimes it hurts. But the burden is significantly less when it’s not squarely on your shoulders. Sharing that burden requires openness and vulnerability. The human element makes these moments more complex and nuanced. We want to hide in order to protect. Shrink in order to avoid. Yet we know, deep down and through tens of thousands of years of evolution, that survival happens in groups. That uniquely human piece of all this is that we aren’t meant to be alone. The ability to be yourself within a group of others doing the same creates a breath of fresh air that has nothing to do with oxygen.

So back to the question. What is community?

I still don’t have a clean answer, but I have a closer one than I did 9 years ago. It’s the bridge I described earlier, only built sideways. Not just between who you are and who you can become, but between you and the person next to you, becoming with you.