The conference is back
And so is joyful insularity.
My friend Jocelyn has a new love who is from a small town in West Virginia. A creature of the coasts, she goes to visit him and falls in love with the coworking space attached to the coffee shop, and the Venezuelan restaurant attached to the music venue, and well, just everyone attached to everyone else. She says, “It really is like Star’s Hollow” — the famed town in The Gilmore Girls, which is exactly what I was thinking as she described her experience.
Jocelyn and I were huddled up at a conference on social innovation in Oxford, England as she told me this story. She took a sip of the free wine that flows so liberally at these kinds of things and said, “You know, this conference is kind of like a small town.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about it after she said it. I’m often both totally overjoyed to be at a conference reuniting with old friends and collaborators, shutting down the pubs, and discomfited by the clubby and elite feel of it all. It’s so enlivening, especially after years of zoom and damn doodle polls. But also why do so many of the same people go to the same circuit of conferences, year after year?
Jocelyn’s comment gave me an insight: perhaps we attend conferences, especially of the social change and innovation variety, because we are trying to subconsciously recreate the feeling of a small town. Our lives are filled with shallow and dizzyingly wide social networks (why do I know so much about people I barely know?!), but really truly, we want to be deeply known and know others’ more deeply.
Traveling endlessly and indiscriminately seems to be waning, even for the most elite people I know, but many of us still aren’t as rooted as we’d like to be. Conferences give us a chance to, even if just for a few days, feel like we belong somewhere specific. There’s a summer camp feel to many of them—that fast, deep, exuberant quality of human connection very much unlike the slow, steady relationship building that happens in the “real world.” (It’s certainly much easier for people running nonprofits to fundraise at conferences, where philanthropists’ are more accessible and not hiding behind stonewalling executive assistants and confusing websites!)
And like small towns, a conference’s strength—the joyful reunion—is also the challenge—insularity and homogeneity. I’ve met more and more conference organizers who are thinking, not just about the diversity on the stage, but the diversity of the audience. How can one maintain the loyal and longstanding love of a conference ritual while also making sure it is an open field, a place where new people are welcomed and integrated? Not an easy balance to strike.
Part of this is up to conference organizers, course, but it’s also up to those of us who attend them. Upon reflection, I realize that I haven’t taken much personal responsibility for that balance in my own behavior. I get swept up in the giddiness of seeing people I already know and don’t reach out as much as I should to meet new people. Or my introversion screams to be honored amidst all the socializing and I do what’s familiar and less taxing—which is hanging with those I already know and love. It reminds me of a stanza in one of my favorite poems, “Seven of Pentacles” by Marge Piercy:
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
I think I could do better on the “taking more in” part. I think we all probably could. When I think about some of my most meaningful conversations over the last week abroad, many of them were tiny moments with strangers: learning about the experience of being a pastor’s wife in a Southern Baptist mostly Chinese congregation, delighting in the exuberance of an indigenous climate activist who still smokes cigarettes (!!!) and clearly uses her humor as an organizing strategy, hearing about a drummer whose college band is still together 20 years later and just sang songs at the bedside of a dying friend.
Insights into the human condition certainly dwell with our longest, deepest friendships, but they also shimmer in the light touches of conversations with strangers in strangely deep moments. If only we keep looking up and out, “tangling and interweaving and taking more in.”
What do you do to take more in, whether in your hometown or in settings like these?
As someone who has always been in many respects an outsider, I have had a long-standing compelling wish to reach my arms around those who might feel disconnected, to make people feel themselves part of a wide embrace. This spirit has permeated my road through life, vocationally and personally.
One thing I have found is that the energy that goes into that embrace needs to have some seasons. Or at least it does at my age.
I do live by a feeling of connection, even if I am at a distance, and want others to feel it whether or not arms are explicitly reaching out. Each of us is part of that assembly of spirited creation and action, one of multitudes living and making side by side across space and time. I wish for us all to feel that and do work toward it continuously.
Oh I love that poem, thank you for sharing! 7 of Pentacles happens to be my tarot card of the month, and it's resonating.