Community Fitness

Society nowadays has become more individualized than ever before. People go on with their lives doing the same routines, talking or not talking to the same people, go home, microwave the same food, watch the same three shows, go to bed and repeat it all over again for the next five or so years. However, research shows that sustaining this mundane lifestyle, this lack of livelihood between each other and our community, is killing our spirit.

Community fitness is a balanced set of physical, mental, emotional and social abilities used throughout communities to connect and satisfy life’s basic need to thrive. Fitness includes those abilities that promote a person’s capacity to adapt to new circumstances and to handle life’s challenges with stamina and grace. Applying fitness into a community helps our abilities of the individual members to contribute to a greater good. Collective well being, harmony with each other and with the planet is what keeps us alive and well. 

Great people like farmers, teachers and coaches contribute to the community by providing food, education and health to the people of their city with no sense of greed. Take for example the people from the short film, the Small Good Thing, a documentary that looked at five individuals in the same community that found their purpose in life by connecting with each other. Proving that one of the greatest predictors of health and happiness are peoples social ties. showing that we must walk through life with people we feel connected to and not the mundane lifestyle mentioned earlier. True community fitness are the farmers stating that they found more fulfillment in giving up their jobs to become full time farmers to give back to their community without worrying too much about income. Showing that this was a sacrifice they were willing to take for a greater cause and believing in Indra’s net.

Indra’s net is a metaphor used to illustrate the concepts of Sunyata (emptiness), Pratityasamutpada (dependent origin), and interpenetration in Buddhist philosophy. Symbolizing the universe as a web of connections and inter dependencies among all its members, wherein every member is both a manifestation of the whole and inseparable from the whole. Each jewel of Indra’s net symbolizes an individual to live out to their calling and find their purpose. “True success in life is fining your purpose and living it out.” As Shirley, the director of Youth Alive from the Small Good Thing. The fundamental idea of the Small Good Thing documentary is the idea of unity in diversity. That each individual can impact the network of community through living out their purpose.

Sadly however not everyone has that same sense of community as these people from the documentary. Society today has become more individualized than ever before. Full time jobs taking up the majority of peoples time. Limiting communication and connection between others and working just for a paycheck. This idea of individualism has become the norm for several years and some people are finally starting to realize that the average well being of our society is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth but rather social stability.

As Richard Wilkinson describes in his ted talk, how economic inequality harms societies. He shows through studies that societies are not looking at human growth but more rather to income growth as a measure of success. Explaining the paradox through the research of life expectancy and wealth within our societies. People are looking at relative income, or one’s social position and social status and comparing those measures to one another. Stating that measuring the size of the gaps between each other is separating our community as a whole. Becoming more or less a competition rather than helping each other out. Furthermore, painting the picture of the consequences of this through the index of health and social problems of life expectancy, math and literacy, infant mortality, homicides, trust, mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction, social mobility and so much more. 

When looking at the level of trust between states in the USA, more equal states have higher trust such as Montana and Wyoming – where most people in these states can be trusted and worst amount of trust is in states like New York. With this lack of trust comes a lack of humility tying all of this into mental illness. Simply stating that mental illness stems from more unequal societies. General social dysfunction is related to inequality. It’s not one or two things that go wrong, it’s most things. The quality of life is much greater in European countries through redistribution.  

The picture above is great at illustrating the psycho-social effect on inequality, more to do with the feelings of superiority and inferiority, being valued. The more communities value status, the more fear of social evaluative judgments increases. The real message, however; is that we can improve the quality of human life by reducing judgment towards people’s incomes and see ourselves as one community. Our culture is more invested in comfort than in truth. Our planet is suffering from our consumer driven way of life. Although we have more connections through the internet and social networking, we as a society have become more isolated and lonely. We have more material wealth, but we are not individually happy.