By Katie Moon
We are often told that to survive climate change, we must rely on our communities. Communities, we hear, provide what no single person can: shared skills, resources, knowledge and support. And that’s true, humans have always survived better together than alone.
But rarely are we asked to pause and question what “community” actually means. When we do, a somewhat different picture emerges. Communities are not seamless wholes but assemblages of interpersonal relations, always shifting, re-forming, sometimes rupturing. They are influenced by wider social norms and expectations, and those dynamics are carried into our own minds and bodies. For many of us, the promise that “community” should be safe, enduring and inclusive does not match lived experience. And that can raise a troubling question: if I don’t fit neatly into my community, does that mean I can’t be resilient?
This paper is the result of a personal inquiry into that question. As I attuned to my own experiences through journalling, meditation, and embodied reflection, what emerged was an alternative view: resilience does not have to depend on belonging to a perfectly coherent collective. Instead, resilience can be cultivated through practices that help us work with the real dynamics of life: the flux of relations, the pull of social norms, and the shifting responses of the mind and body.
These practices include listening to the body’s signals; noticing how social constructs like belonging or safety shape how we connect; observing how the mind generates stories that can distort or separate; recognising that relations are always shifting; and finally, choosing consciously, and with care, how we act and respond.
Through these practices, we can still benefit from the skills, resources, knowledge and care that emerge in collective life, without expecting community to be permanent or even inclusive. Resilience, then, is not about securing stability outside ourselves. It is about cultivating awareness and care within ourselves, so that we can engage more flexibly, honestly and compassionately with the communities we are part of, however they appear and however they change.
Relational Thinking 