A few months ago I wrote about a beach gathering in Estepona. A group of expats meeting once a week, no agenda beyond a question and an open invitation. I remember thinking, wherever you are, you can practice conviviendo. It didn’t need a perfect structure or a five year plan. It just needed someone willing to ask a good question and leave room for people to answer honestly.
I’ve been thinking about that line a lot lately, because happygal and I finally tried it ourselves. Not in Spain. Not on some trip, here in North County San Diego! A breakfast spot a few minutes from our house, on an ordinary Saturday morning.
We called it Global Citizens. Nine people showed up. The youngest was twenty four, the oldest in their late sixties, and everyone in between. People we knew well, people we’d met once, people who were basically strangers to us until that morning.
I didn’t know exactly what would happen once everyone sat down. But the conversation just kept going. Why people ended up living in North County, or San Diego more broadly. What they’d learned from traveling or living abroad, and what they were trying to bring home with them. Parenting. Medical stuff. How to host, or whether hosting is even the right word for what we were doing. At some point people were just finding each other, the way you do when someone says something true and someone else says, wait, me too.
What surprised me the most … the event was supposed to be 9-11am, it was noon and everyone was still there! Conversations were so lively, people forgot about time for that one morning.
I left feeling energized in a way I wasn’t expecting. Heard. Human, maybe, is the closest word. I sat with people I didn’t really know an hour before, and somehow it didn’t feel like small talk at all.
Maybe this is the same thing Cassandra found on that beach in Estepona. She didn’t set out to build a group. She was looking for community, and she made a small doorway for other people to walk through. I think that’s what Saturday morning was too. Not an event, really. Just a doorway, and nine people who decided to walk through it.
I keep coming back to something I wrote after Spain, that community doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t need the perfect venue or the right crowd or a fully formed vision. Sometimes it’s a beach towel. Sometimes it’s a breakfast table at Ki’s. Sometimes it’s just a willingness to ask people what they actually care about, and then really listen to the answer.
I don’t know yet what Global Citizens becomes. Maybe it’s a once a month thing. Maybe it grows, maybe it stays small and that’s exactly right. But I’m realizing the question was never really about the format. It was about whether we were willing to keep creating small circles like this, wherever we happen to be.
Conviviendo wherever you are turned out to include right here, at a breakfast table, with people I’m grateful to know a little better now.
