Seeing both near and far: Lessons from the 2022 Belonging Gathering

Photos by Guenther Creative

By Frank Nam, We Belong Here project director

As I’ve gotten older, I find myself having more difficulty reading things up close. Documents, my phone, and menus all present difficulty with my contacts on. I’m sure many of us are — or will be — familiar with this slow optical atrophy. My blended bifocal glasses help, but I still had trouble with my contacts until my optometrist had a brilliant yet simple solution.

She changed by prescription so that my left eye can see close (as best as possible) and my right can see farther away. When these two different signals reach my brain, it magically blends the two views into a singular frame. When I close one eye, I can see either nearer or farther, depending on the eye. It feels like magic!

This ability to see both near and far is a fitting analogy to the work that we continued during last month’s 2022 Belonging Gathering. In order to help grow the practice and impacts of Belonging, we need to be able to see both the present and the future at the same time. The Belonging Compact introduces four practices that help build belonging: Conversations, Community, Advocacy, and Personal Growth.

We all need to view these practices as they impact us, and those closest to us, in the present. This means holding safe spaces for conversations within your community, advocating for yourself and your family, or working on mental health.

During the Belonging Gathering, Luis Ortega of Storytellers for Change offered the idea of being in a just relationship with oneself. He heightened the importance of navigating inwardly to be at peace with our past, our family, and our experiences that have shaped us.

At the same time, to build Belonging we need to also see through the lens of the future. We need to work on these practices with an expanded circle of human concern, as john a. powell describes. This means building bridges between communities that may differ in religion, culture, and politics. It also means having the longer view of how our advocacy can address larger problems holistically. It means having the awareness to know that we can grow our collective resources to meet both our own needs and the needs of others.

At the end of the Belonging Gathering, we asked our participants to fill out commitment cards. These cards asked people to describe how they would answer this call to action. Here are some of their thoughts:

“...embrace complexity. Reject good guy/bad guy narratives”

“Continuing to create opportunities for conservatives and progressives to get to know one another beyond stereotypes”

“Get out and meet people. Volunteer. Listen. Attend arts/science/civic events. Challenge yourself. Be exposed to multiple perspectives to better understand our complex world.”

“Step out of your echo chamber!”

As you can see, our time together over two days really helped us take the time to build relationships, hear each other’s stories, and weave them together for collective action. Even with that being said, we have work to do.

One of our guests did not share the liberal political views more popular in our region. There were too many assumptions about everyone’s politics and that created a sense of Othering (the opposite of Belonging) in her experience.

Take a moment to think about who is in your network of Belonging. Is it mostly people who are similar to you? Do you seek out relationships with those from different lived experiences and opinions? Do you even have the time and energy to do that? Do you have enough to worry about because you feel anxious and threatened by the world as it is?

Whatever your answer is, it is the right answer, in the present. We need to feel safe and secure. We need to be able to have strong opinions. We need to be able to take care of those who are closest to us.

AND… we also need to expand our answers in a longer, future-orientated scale. We need to expand our circle of human concern. We need a future that works for everyone. We need space to collectively heal, grow, and succeed.

And we need to remember, together, that we belong here.