# How I want to live

## After "happily ever after"

I wonder if, like me, you've had dreams of how you'd like to like to live one day. If only you had a loving partner to live with. If only you could afford your own home. If only you could escape the rate race and have some land in the country. If only you could be close to the action. If only you could live near family, or away from family, or maybe it takes a village, or maybe a quiet retreat.

There are many ways to live. Those of us who don't enjoy a nuclear family home in the suburbs tend to reach out for other solutions. I've tried moving to a cute little town with a thriving main street; an inner city apartment; a hobby farm; moving to a different country. I've also tried intentional community, including an urban co-housing development, a rural self-reliant ecovillage, and shared house activist co-living. None of these are bad ways to live, in fact in many ways all of them are wonderful, but none of them seem to have been my *happily ever after*.

## The joy of the commons

While access to physical resources can be important, from a good library to a coastal view, in most cases it was the human landscape of relationships that made a living situation work well or work poorly. We can see that we're constantly being sold a life bereft of community, where our comfortable suburban home can order in any service we require from a gig-economy worker we've never met, and it's clear to many that there's a hollowness there which can only be filled the vibrancy of community life. Finding that community often means choosing to opt-in to a community living project that requires all our capital, financial and social. Whether it works for us depends on whether our life goals stay fixed, on whether it was everything we dreamed, and on whether we can avoid some breakdown in the relationships and agreements that make up a community.

Community is hard. Community is also worth it. In community we can experience the joy of connecting with other people in small ways, without needing them to be totally compatible as friends or lovers, nor needing to treat them as anonymous strangers. Community exposes us to diverse viewpoints and skills. Community is better at raising children, for both the children and the parents. Community also gives us the ability to find ways to share resources rather than focus on individual ownership and the accumulation of stuff.

## Commoning together

If community is worth it, where is the perfect one? Why have I lived in some truly excellent communities and yet they didn't become my permanent way of living? I'm convinced that the answer is that change is inevitable. Our relationships change, our careers, our interests, and perhaps even our values. I may change more than some people, as I see some people living the same way for a decades and I get itchy feet even thinking about it. Perhaps I am speaking only to those who don't see themselves living one lifestyle for the rest of their lives, or have already experienced a change like moving countries, itchy feet to move rurally and start raising a garden, or regretted the quiet house after children grow up and move out. I suspect that many people who have the privilege of feeling safe and having their basic needs met value changing lifestyles to some degree. If that's you, the good news is that embracing change gives us the ability to approach community in powerful new ways.

Community as I've used it above is a group of people who live together in a way that shares some common principles, agreements, and resources. I stayed at many communities before I chose the ones I lived in, and I carefully studied their common land, and their processes for living together, so I could understand what sort of commons I wanted to be part of (in my perfect "happily ever after" community).

Not only did what I want change, but also "commons" is best understood not as a static thing which we can examine, but a constant ongoing process of **commoning**. *"People often think of commons as being ‘the stuff’ – e.g. a piece of land, but a commons is not a commons until it’s actively commoned, in everyday usage, by some people who know they have a common relationship with it, and a mutual responsibility."* ([from lowimpact.org](https://www.lowimpact.org/lowimpact-topic/commoning/)) When we practice commoning actively, we participate in an evolving commons which has less chance of becoming a stage of our life that we outgrow or regret, and also far greater chance of helping us evolve the way we relate to other people and the planet.

How does this relate to choosing how and where we want to live? Abstractly it means that maybe we don't have to choose. We may be changing beings, but also commoning is an active process of change. Embracing forms of commoning which celebrate diversity, dissensus, and change means we can pick and choose elements of living which can change over time, even week to week, in the same way that we might pick from different elements when designing our relationships.

I plan to write further on ideas I have for achieving that, but if this sparks ideas from you, [I'd love to hear your thoughts](mailto:[e-mail]).