Friendships, Community & creating history with people.

Saturday morning musings on relationship building

If you had asked me 20 years ago who my friends were, I would have rattled off the names of those with whom I went to high school and college. I assumed that my life after college would have been similar to all my friends were going through.

Most young women in the culture and community I was raised with would be married by 23/24. They would settle in the cities where they or their husbands worked, and life would move on. You would find friendships in the apartment you lived in, the place of work, or your local temple or church. Perhaps you were lucky enough to live near family, in which case you might have built-in friendships with cousins, siblings, etc. Friendships were not super complicated unless you uprooted and moved to an entirely new city or country.

At least, I never thought finding friends and building a community was complicated or challenging. Not until I left my country of birth or the country I was raised in.

Born in India, I was raised in the Sultanate of Oman in a thriving Indian community. Note, I say Indian, not Christian. I was surrounded by families and friends from different religious and socio-economic backgrounds. When we went to church, I had friends, and my family had a community with those who worshipped the same God as us, and those families are my lifelong friends. We might not have spoken to each other in years, but the ties that bind are strong and run deep.

Outside of church, I was surrounded by a community from school and the apartment complexes we lived in. No one thought twice of inviting people home for chai or dinner. Every Diwali and Eid, my family was the recipient of delicious sweets and goat biriyani (a seasoned rice dish), and the week before Christmas, my dad and I helped my mom bake fruit cakes and other fun treats to share with our neighbours. We always had scores of friends coming home on Christmas Day to wish us and grab a quick treat. It was NOT a day JUST for the family! Even when celebrating Christmas in India, where family surrounded us, a festival always meant including neighbours and those who did not observe the same festival. That is how it was in India and still is, to a large extent. Growing up Indian, I did not have terms for the built-in community. Today you could use words like Inclusive or communal. Back then, I took such a community for granted. I never realized how valuable it was until I left the shores of India for life on another continent. Life in the United States.

Before I start my thoughts, I deeply appreciate my life in the United States. It has taught me a radical dependence on God and resilience I never knew I had.

Building community and friendship in the United States has been the most challenging thing my husband and I have ever had to do! I would even be so bold as to speak for the Indian diaspora in the United States when I say every single one of us has felt excluded, alone, lonely, and confused at some point or other in the lives we have built here. It is hard. Just plain hard. You could always tell me maybe I should not be here and return to my country of origin, and you have a point. After all, we chose to come, and we decided to stay. Yes, you are right!

But that is not the point.

Building community, friendships, and history with people are complex when you are a foreigner. You don't have built-in places to go to find that, and you introduce a new word into your vocabulary -intentionality! I have never used that word in my life as much as I have in the last two years!

We started our American life in Troy, Michigan, where we knew no one! Nada! Some social connections from work and family in other parts of the country led us to a little Indian church. We did not know any of these people, but they welcomed us warmly into their circle and community and included us. We did not all come from similar backgrounds in India, we did not all go to the same colleges or grow up in the same town, but we were all foreigners in a strange land. They just made the table wider to include us. They made us feel welcome.

While attending this little church, we were invited to participate in a membership class at a local American church. The members here were sweet, welcoming, and very gracious, but apart from the fellowship meal of meatloaf & mashed potatoes, the relationship went nowhere. As a young couple with a 22-month-old, we had no idea what people did after service ended at 11:30 am.

However, if you are a new family attending an Indian church, you can be guaranteed someone will invite you home for lunch or a cup of tea.

Friendship needs time, time with no agendas, time with no plans, just room to be, to exist, to just be! Without a schedule or a plan! Intentionality is not the concept. It's just being.

Fast forward a few years, we found ourselves in a new state, a new church, one with people from India and families just like ours, and we found a built-in community. There were long Sunday lunches, afternoon teas, monthly birthday parties, impromptu visits to each other's homes, and a sense of community that was seamless and easy. We did not have to try. We could just be.

I am not saying this community was without problems, but nothing in life is because we are broken people living in a broken world.

O, Alan Noble in his blog, You are Not your own, says, "Sometimes we got so caught up in small talk (and there is a place for) that we never touched the other person's life, but over time trust was established, and we started to understand each other."

We lived in that community and built relationships there despite the challenges that came along the way. But alas, life is not that simple, is it?

And if you take a group of people from anywhere in the world, put them in another country, and ask them to live, it's natural for them to assimilate and adopt the culture and nuances of life in the other nation. And we did. We were immigrants from India, a communal people by nature, and we were learning how to be individualistic. I started to learn to express my individualism. I thought about what was "comfortable" for my family and me. I set schedules and plans and organized our social calendar. After all, anything worth doing had to be done systematically, and calendars must be planned months ahead of time with "intentionality."

How else could one live? After all, everywhere I saw, in schools, churches, local events, and children's sports, everything was scheduled. People lived by schedules. Weekdays and weekends were planned to a T, and there was no room for spontaneity.

But let me tell you a secret- I started to enjoy it. I discovered I liked this planning and the structure of meeting people. I was able to dictate the time, not have late nights and chaotic meal planning and even have people home for dinner, but also be able to send them back home by 9 pm so I could have ME time. And I told myself this was right and for the best.

But the years rolled on. My family and I grew older, and so did our community. We were getting used to a particular way of life, and I was thriving on being intentional and structured.

Please do not get me wrong; structure is not inherently bad. On the contrary, when used wisely, structure is good and allows us to be the best version of ourselves. Structure allows us to be healthy and productive in all areas of our life. Removing chaos and distractions from our life will enable us to learn deep focus and even impact change. As an Enneagram 1, I naturally gravitate towards structure. But people being human and messy don't always align with structure.

In India, visiting friends at home is a prevalent activity. Growing up, I was dragged along for numerous house visits with my parents. I did complain and whine when we went to homes without children because then I would be bored, but as I grew up, I learnt to enjoy the company of other adults, learnt how to engage with them, and also saw how it made people feel when we spent time with them.

My husband and I love visiting people. When we were a young couple with a one-year-old, we made it a point to visit my granny and his great-aunt every Sunday. Both of them looked forward to our trips, and now that they have passed on, I am so thankful we made that time.

We tried very hard to continue that habit here in the US; at first, it was easy. But as time went on, as schedules for us and others changed, it got complicated. We used to be able to stop by without a phone call or text. But patterns of life changed, and people expected us to give them a heads up a week ahead of time, and some even told us not to come. So let me be brutally honest and say while it was hard to visit our Indian friends without a call ahead, it was and is next to impossible to visit our American friends without a call ahead. Dropping by unannounced was not considered de rigueur.

Over the last two years of the pandemic, my husband and I have explored the word "intentionality" many times. We left our Indian church of 14 years and moved to a more multi-ethnic one. We left behind the built-in community, which we loved dearly. We discovered we had to figure out a new one.

When you do not have a history of collegiate education, you do not have college friends here, let alone high school friends. Nearly all of our family is back in India. So, we had to "intentionally" build relationships to build history. Let me just say that it is hard! Sometimes it sucks! There is only so much of oneself we can put out emotionally. Every time we build a new relationship, we have to share our story. Why? Because not everyone knows our history.

We have learnt to be vulnerable and available. We have learnt to be flexible and willing to share our stories over and over. We must be open to answering questions about our background and culture more than once. We have to be OK if we are occasionally left out of groups, gatherings, or celebrations. Not because our friends do not care about us, but because we do not have that history with them and might not always be on the "go-to list" of people you call.

The pandemic afforded us the time to think about our lives in this country for the next ten years. We are both in our 40s, and soon, our children will be gone to build their own lives. We realized we could not build our lives around our children. We have so much to give. We have so much to learn, and we are willing to invest. But it's hard always to be the one to make the first move.

I realized this the hard way when we left our previous church. Community and friendships that seemed so easy became hard. We had structured time to connect and engage at church all Sunday. But once we left, we had to be intentional in connecting. We tried. Our old friends tried. But it became hard. When you don't see someone for months, it becomes easier not to try to see them. Relationships are also a two-way street. Once it gets easier not to connect, why bother trying? There are days when I feel guilty, but I tell myself I am maintaining bandwidth and keep moving. Yes, I could try harder, but some days I don't.

I know in my heart; God has called me to be a bridge-builder or a connector. My friend Janet calls me the friend-whisperer. She is generous. Most days, I don't feel like that. I miss the unstructured friendships of apartment life in Oman and India. I miss being able to step outside my front door and have a 30-minute chat with my neighbour. I miss dropping by unannounced. I miss people dropping by unannounced at my door!

I hate social media for giving people the opportunity to document every get-together, dinner, party, or small group gathering. I hate feeling left out. I hate being intentional all the time

I want to be mindful in all I do. I want to be inclusive, but all too often these days, it's easier for me to think of those I want to leave off my list instead of adding to. I tell myself it's because I want my "people" around me. I don't have "people." I have a lot of people in my life. I am thankful for those who pursue my family and me. I am grateful for those inconvenienced by trying to build a history with me. I am thankful for those who consider me family.

At 23, I never expected life to be the way it is today, the good and the bad. Community, friends, and the people you build your life with were not things I thought much about or considered. But the last 21 years have been a crazy journey filled with hard life lessons.

I am thankful for those lessons, although some days they seem too hard, and I want to cry.

I am thankful for structure because it allows me the space to think and write. Building community is hard. Building community is challenging. But it's worth it.

I do not always like the word "intentional," but I remind myself that intentionality is worth it.

We need to be intentional. We need to be mindful in our friendships. We need to be inconvenienced in our relationships. We do not always need to be structured. We can let go of our control a tad.

 And if we want to build a history with people, we need space and time just to be. So, we have to give ourselves that. And we need to be grateful for our built-in community if we have it and nurture it well. Relationships and community building are two-way streets; if we do not do our part, they will start to crack.

If you are reading this last sentence, thank you for taking the time to journey with me on my weekend musings on friendships & community.