Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Why do you need Archives?

[Ken Winter (ken]

Thank you, Sharon ~

A timely contemplation for my community as we age and transition and head
toward our 25th anniversary next year.

For what it's worth, I re-titled it as I sent it out to my community:
"Community History: Who Cares? Why Care?"  Thought that might be better
click-bait 😁.

~ Ken Winter, Sunward Cohousing


On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 2:03 PM Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> I love doing research and reading history so just the entertainment value
> of being able to read newspapers and letters that have been saved from
> other lives is reason enough to “keep everything”.
>
> A practical reason is to "prove what happened” or didn’t happen. What was
> really decided and why? What was the order of events? Yes, we agreed that
> all plantings along the green would be flowering plants but what did “all”
> and “flowering” mean in 1989? (Anyone who has been following the
> conservative interpretations of the US Constitution will recognize this
> argument.)
>
> But there is a much more important reason — to remember and understand
> where you have come from and to include new members in the fullest
> experience of the community.
>
> My image of cohousing is of family compounds. Places where generations of
> families have built camps or summer homes and everyone gathers not just
> summers but on holidays as well. And some people may stay year around. Or a
> farming family that builds additional houses on the land as the generations
> grow. The households are together but peacefully private as well.
>
> So when we had a rash of new members, in one two year period about 7
> households turned over, I started thinking about how families integrate new
> members. Our members had left for all the normal reasons family members
> change but the changes had clustered which increased the force. How had
> families traditionally integrated new members and remained one family?  For
> generations. (Obviously, not all do but we are talking utopian dreams here.)
>
> As we tried to include new members, I was struck by how often new members
> would close off discussions by saying “That’s history. This is now.” Or “we
> aren’t talking about history, we are starting fresh from today.” “There is
> no history; it’s just us.” “We do things differently."
>
> When I offered to show a new resident who had just had a baby, pictures of
> other babies born in the community, she wasn’t interested unless they
> weren’t still in the community — people who were here right now. That
> others of us had loved these babies, babies that had played with the same
> toys her baby was playing with, had no meaning for her.
>
> While there are good times to try to start fresh and put the past behind
> us, ignoring the past will pretty much leave you with a very thin present.
> New friends can be like fresh air, but even an old enemy can be more
> comfortable. I once lamented to a colleague that there were so many new
> faculty members and that meetings were unpredictable and even unproductive.
> I just wanted some old friends in the room. He said, “Even old enemies
> would a good thing.”
>
> The ways I know that families integrate new members is in the preparation
> of meals, the sharing of stories “about when”, and dragging out photograph
> albums. Meals require interaction in tasks we are all familiar with (for
> the most part) so there is a task for everyone. If we are going to continue
> to be a family, we need to learn everything related to food and meals.
> Sharing ourselves is sharing our stories. That is who we are. How we got to
> be who we are. And photographs provide more opportunities to share stories
> and deepen the experience of those no longer present but still very much
> alive in everyone’s lives. If “Aunt Mabel” was the defining force in most
> of the family member’s lives and they have no interest in forgetting her.
> And couldn’t if they wanted to.
>
> New people often felt excluded when we talked about “the past” or
> mentioned by name people who were no longer there. “See, we don’t know who
> that is so that story just excludes us.” As if we were telling those
> stories just to show new members that they weren’t really members.
>
> Understanding the present means understanding the past. The reason we have
> no hot water in the guest rooms or that it takes 15 minutes to get there is
> not because we are dumb or don’t know how to run a pipe, it’s because the
> people who originally chose the hot water heater were trying to save money
> by installing a high-efficiency gas water heater instead of a much less
> efficient electric water heater. The fact that the gas water heater had to
> go on the other side of the building, 100 ft away because it needed an
> exhaust vent, instead of in the basement right under the guestrooms (and
> the laundry room) didn’t occur to them. They had new graduate degrees in
> energy efficiency.
>
> Those are the stories that are still alive and well in the community, that
> make it a community. They need to be shared if everyone is going to feel
> included. I still haven’t figured out — other than meals — how to share
> these stories, because it takes time. Not as much time as it took to create
> the stories but a lot of time. One of the things we used to do on the
> anniversary of move-in was to tell stories about what it was like (chaos)
> but after a few years, only the founding members attend.
>
> One of the nice things about old members coming back to visit is that it
> puts a face on those old memories.
>
> Sharon
> ----
> Sharon Villines
> Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
> http://www.takomavillage.org
>
>
>
>
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