Community

The past couple of  weeks have made me think about communities of which I've been a part. There are a lot of them, and often it's the people that end up being most important to me about a place or experience. Here are a few recent moments that have really highlighted community for me.

My RIPS team's site visit to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was on the Thursday before final presentations, and we had negotiated with the RIPS director to stay in the Bay Area and spend Friday and Saturday in San Francisco. On Saturday morning, I posted a picture I'd taken on Friday to Facebook, and within an hour I had a message from a friend from Oklahoma asking if I had time to meet up. We were both in the city with other people, but we ended up meeting and talking for about half an hour. We took several small classes together in high school, but it had been two and a half years since we'd seen each other, so it was nice to catch up!

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It was Sunday morning, and we were working because we had spent Friday exploring San Francisco. In the late morning, Mariette and I went to Santa Monica to meet Zsuzsa, our academic mentor, at the Farmers Market to go over our report draft. We ended up spending about two and a half hours in Santa Monica, and we were looking at the report for an hour at most. The rest we spent eating giant pancakes and omelets and just talking. Final presentations were in two days, and we were running behind on our report, but we had that morning of peace.

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Jacques, who was in the graph theory research group and graduated in 2014, has been visiting Boston and messaged me after visiting the group professors. "Heard you're applying to grad school. Let's talk some time about your plans as there's a lot of strategy that comes into play." We're now planning on Skyping next week. Sometimes I forget how helpful communities can be.

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At church, we're planning worship for September 13th, which is Welcome Back Sunday. One of the staff members emailed all the college students to ask if we would be willing to help with a reading. Three years ago, there were no college students at Christ Church. Now there are ten of us who come at least semi-regularly (though one will be abroad this fall), and there are a couple more who come occasionally.