I’ve lived in large cities, suburbs, and a smaller rural community, and I’ve enjoyed many things about all three. Yet recently, my time on the North Shore reminded me why I like living in and visiting smaller places so much. The lessons I’ve learned from rural environments have been incredibly impactful. I’ve applied many of them to my work with organizations, my approach to systems change, and even my relationships. My view of systems as a whole, rather than a part, has come from experiences in these smaller places as well.
Learning about complex systems in a rural community
We often confuse small with simple. I have found that rural communities are highly complex, filled with people who think differently while remaining deeply connected to the area and each other. Small places are a wonderful training ground for seeing how things connect to each other in complex ways. If a store closes on Main Street, for example, the ripple effects touch social, economic, educational, and political systems. If the school system is consolidated into an area school structure, it reshapes the community’s identity while creating new challenges for people with a rural lifestyle.
Large urban centers have the same connectivity and interdependence, but it is harder to see. If a store closes in downtown Minneapolis, we see it as an episodic separate event rather than something that has intended and unintended impacts on the larger community.
Living in rural areas helped me tune into and experience a system’s complex connectivity. It’s tough to miss the interdependence that exists in smaller places. Living and visiting smaller places taught me how something changing in one place can have profound implications for a community and its people. Once that happened, it was much easier to see interdependence in larger organizations or cities.
Uncovering the nuances in relationships
It is difficult to “other” someone who lives in a rural community. In a smaller place, our relationships require us to be more nuanced and holistic when seeing others. We see their family and friends, their history, and their present activities all at the same time. This gives us a rich contextual experience of a person.
For example, you might know that a person has very different political beliefs than you. Yet, if you’re working on a community project alongside them, that shared purpose might help you see them more holistically. Your children might be friends and ride the bus to school together. The more obvious interdependence of rural communities helps us find ways of seeing a person’s gifts to a community. It lessens the internal (or external) noise of disagreements or differences between values, actions, and lifestyles.
Focusing on wholeness, not parts
Rural living has also given me the gift of wholeness. This may be easier to understand when we think about urban centers, which are often seen as a collection of parts. In a large city, the business sector is separate from the non-profit sector. The educational sector is separate from the political sector.
In rural areas, all these different sectors are woven together, interconnected in ways both seen and unseen. This interdependence helps us see the strength of the whole, not just the strengths of various parts.
And that wholeness is actually scalable. When we see people as whole beings, organizations as wholistic, and communities as whole, we can transcend self-interest and work to improve the whole community. This perspective keeps us curious. We make individual and collective decisions based on the ways things are integrated. As a result, we’re bound us together more tightly, and this in turn pulls us toward working for a better collective future.
The gifts of living in a rural community
These three gifts of living in rural places have also helped me value the sense of place and deep context that place-based living brings. It invites us to plant our feet deep into the soil of our community.
I facilitated a conversation with a group of people from four different communities a while ago. The exercise was to ask each individual the following question: What do you love about your community that you would like to pass on to your grandchildren? All the answers were great, but one that I still remember to this day was … “Dirt, I love dirt! I love planting things that grow in dirt and planting my roots in this place. I want future generations to feel the importance of being connected to this place and the power of being anchored in their life!”
For those of you who live and work in large organizations, there are still places to experience small, complex systems that you can learn from. There are always small microecologies/communities within larger systems. I invite you to seek them out and receive the gifts that small, complex systems can teach us.
