I started the library thinking it would be all about books, but really it’s about community.
Specifically for me, it’s meant working with more than 200 people – 180 bookshelf-owners and 60 regular and ad-hoc librarians – and countless other people who’re interested in the library, who want to work with us, or who’d like to use the library to connect with their communities.
Even though I sometimes believe I stumbled into this community-building thing with the library, I realize it’s what I’ve been doing since forever.
In 2012 I was hosting a weekly two-hour radio show. The listeners of my show and I were passionately – if quite introvertedly – organized around our shared interests of music, literature, the beatniks, Leonard Cohen’s poetry and his mysticism, and the cozy liminal can’t-quite-put-your-finger-to-it magic of late-night radio. We connected in those days through, of all things, our radio station’s SMS system. It was an archaic but oddly moving way of communicating with each other.
The cafe I started as a 20-year-old also attracted a certain group of people. I think many of them were seeking out alternative spaces in which they could be more themselves, whatever that meant, during a time when Singaporean society was shifting beyond survival. The young people of that time had a lot of burning new questions that needed answering, and they were hungry to meet people who could even begin to understand these questions.
But this library is a little different. I think it’s got to do with the stake people have in it. Our volunteer librarians can shape how the library is run. Our bookshelf-owners alter the experience of the library every time they remove or add a book or a note to their shelf. We’re playing and creating together in real-time. Not only that, we have to work, and it’s this effortful, again, can’t-quite-put-your-finger-to-it thing of having to give of yourself, that creates a strong community.
I don’t mean that this community sees each other every day. But they nevertheless feel a sense of belonging to the space and to what has been built. They don’t want to see it disappear, and they will do quite a lot to keep it going. And the more they give and help, the more fulfilling it is to be part of this community.
To quote social explorer and committed community-builder Cormac Russell, community is indeed a verb, not a noun.
Having said that, all communities are important and much-needed, regardless of how they’re built. After all, everything is community-building. Even if I were alone in this world, I’d be building a community with my mind, my soul, and the trillions of cells in my body.
The desire for communion seems to be burned into the blueprint of our being, and maybe it’d be a mistake, for most of us, to not answer this call.