Social and Community Wellbeing — Why They Matter (part 2)

Social and Community Wellbeing can be hard to find, easy to forget, and immensely rewarding.

In my last post, I spoke of the challenges to Social and Community Wellbeing posed by social media, globalisation, and the pandemic. I also reiterated why Social and Community Wellbeing are so important to both healthy individuals and a healthy society.?

How do I know this? Essays on society by 20th century philosophers will only get you so far; fundamentally, Social and Community Wellbeing have to be experienced in order to be understood.?

I was lucky enough to experience them from the youngest age. Growing up in Patiala, Punjab, India, the customs surrounding family, food and faith were an integral part of everyday life, bringing structure, order and, most importantly, meaning to what we did. A sense of belonging gave even the most mundane of acts a certain depth.

Yes, Social and Community Wellbeing are more difficult to come by these days. But they are by no means impossible to find.

As with every other aspect of Wholistic Wellbeing, there is no one-size-fits-all: the steps I may take to ensure Social and Community Wellbeing for myself may not be the same as yours. Introverts and extroverts will have different standards on what constitutes sociability, communication, and gregariousness. There is no universally shared language around sociability — which is, in fact, the very reason why different communities exist.?

But there is one universal rule to ensure Social and Community Wellbeing for oneself, and that rule is self-reflection; the act of pausing and re-evaluating what we want out of our relationships, and what type of social activity we need to prioritise to enhance our overall Wholistic Wellbeing.?

Pausing and re-evaluating are useful catchphrases, but they don't necessarily offer a clear set of instructions. Does pausing mean closing our eyes and breathing slowly? Does re-evaluating mean making lists and diagrams to map out our future and think of our relationships in utilitarian terms (this friend for parties; that friend for deep chats)?

No. Pausing and re-evaluating are not prescriptions; they are guidelines — lines of thought that will, literally, guide you towards clarity.

As the ideas of pausing and re-evaluating imply, that clarity often only comes to us in times of stress and worry. In my case, it wasn’t until I started suffering from burnout, in my role as CEO of Edifecs, that I stopped for a moment to reassess the sanity of my life choices and my relationships. My career up to that point had been such a swift succession of jobs and successes that other aspects of my life became subsumed by a seemingly endless work high.

During the years of soul-searching that culminated in the foundation of RoundGlass, I realised that, like jobs, relationships need work. They need cultivating, nurturing, guidance, and rewards. They occasionally need managing, restructuring, or even merging.

This is why my vision of Wholistic Wellbeing grants equal importance to Social and Community Wellbeing as it does to Professional Wellbeing. Each pillar is intertwined and contiguous with our overall health and happiness. Only when we begin to acknowledge the connections between our personal, professional, social and private lives that we can truly thrive and excel in each of them respectively.?

It’s easy to take Social and Community Wellbeing for granted when you grow up in an environment based entirely around them, as was the case for me. And when that’s the case, they are just as easy to lose.?

But while I may have temporarily lost my Social and Community Wellbeing, one thing I didn’t lose was my belief in Dharma — a philosophical touchstone of Sikhism in Punjab. It is the idea that social order is governed by cosmic law; that an individual and a community’s path are traced to reflect the path of the universe; and that we are part of something infinitely greater than ourselves. It was this belief that, overtime, brought me the clarity I so sorely needed, and allowed me to make time for successful, rewarding relationships whilst embracing my professional passions.

My vision for RoundGlass is to provide the space and resources for people to rest and reflect; to breathe and reset; to strengthen bonds with their loved ones and find their place within a community. As we come out of a global pandemic, this is more urgent and important than ever.?