The Life-Work Community Inquiry

1. Life-Work Communities are communities of people.

2. That which defines a Life-Work Community is that it consists of people who choose to continuously inquire into which perspectives inform their life and work.

So we don't necessarily have the same perspectives. The point is that we are willing to inquire into our perspectives and their influence on how we work and live our life. The sense of community comes, among other things, from the fact that we choose sometimes to do the inquiry together.

3. The continuous inquiry into perspectives is the defining action and intention. But the 'every day' activity of the Life-Work Community is conversations on life and work.

These conversations can, depending on the situation, happen in various forms. The Flow Game is one such form that we are looking into at the moment. It could also happen in a concrete inquiry into an issue of a client of one of the participants of the Flow Game. Or a concrete situation in our lives. Or a picnic. Or...

4. Who is part of my Life-Work Community?, or: Which Life-Work Communities am I a part of? 'My' Life-Work Communities consist of the people in my life where we mutually know about each other that we are willing to, together, to be in a continuous inquiry into the perspectives that inform each of our lives and our work.

I find that there are degrees of intensity - with some people the feeling of community is intense and the willingness to inquire is great and it often happens, -and with others the feeling of community is less intense, the wilingness is less, or even if it is declared to be great, it still only happens more seldom.

5. Yours and my Life-Work Communities, then, are not communities of the same people, but where there is an overlap, we will experience them as one.

6. A Life-Work Community can be seen as a social structure, held together by the willingness to inquire into the highest perspectives and by conversations on life and work. So that which knits the social structure together, then, is less concrete than that which knits structures like networks, office communities, families, communes, businesses etc. But all the more concrete expressions of social structures could also be part of the Life-Work Community social structure - if it serves a concrete purpose. So, I can be part of a Life-Work Community with a group of five people, and go into business with two of them. And have the third as my spouse...etc. No earlier social structures of human communities are being made superfluous by the possibility of a Life-Work Community. The Life-Work Community is an expression of some new ways to be in community, in addition to the known and tested ones.

A quote by Rev. Dr Sarah Mitchell:

Communitas [Sarah York writes] is what happens when a whole group of people cross a threshold and together enter liminal time and space – that is, an in-between time that is neither past nor present and a space that is neither here nor there. In that threshold space, they experience a bond, and it is not like any bond they may experience in their ordinary structured lives. York’s definition demonstrates that communitas is not the same as community. Communitas is a process where no-one is marginalized, because everyone is on the margin. It is a transitory period of transformation, which enables societies to return to their way of living in dramatically new ways. Who the people are is not what is important here – any group of people can form communitas. What is important is that the focus is on the action of this group; they cross a threshold together.

Finn Voldtofte