Are we living comfortably yet? Some thoughts for the New Forest Co-housing Community

I have been thinking about the word “comfortable” recently. I know it doesn’t sound very exciting, but I think living in an exciting community might be too exhausting. Instead, I’m going to suggest that we build two sorts of “comfortable” into our project: environmental comfort and social comfort.

My guru of environmental comfort is the architect Professor Christopher Alexander. To give you some hints about him, here’s a quote from The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth:

“The purpose of all architecture … is to provide opportunities for life-giving situations. The central … purpose is to … provide encouragement and support for life-giving comfort and profound satisfaction … so that one experiences life as worth living.”

If you would like to experience how it feels to be in a building built with this philosophy in mind, visit West Dean Gardens, just outside Chichester, and sit in the visitor centre. When I first went there my initial thought was “this doesn’t feel very architectural”.

But that’s the point. It fits perfectly into its surroundings, and when I sit inside I feel perfectly comfortable (except for my bum: Alexander had no part in designing the cushions for the wooden chairs!) Certainly when I’m at West Dean Gardens I experience life as worth living. Alexander’s ideas help us to design all our spaces, from rooms, to buildings to the overall site, to provide encouragement and support for life-giving comfort.

But today I want to talk more about social comfort.

I’m a bit of a complicated character with a life story that’s too long to go into. Don’t encourage me, I’m likely to go on forever! Recently I have felt uncomfortable in NFCH: not the fault of anyone, just my own “stuff”. As a result I felt the need to withdraw to reduce my level of discomfort.

Several interesting things happened. The first was that I became aware of other people experiencing discomfort (not for the same reasons as me). I also experienced various people offering comfort and support (with varying degrees of success).

And, coincidentally Susan and I were attending (via Zoom link) a retreat that was taking place 5000 miles away in the very top-left corner of the USA, just inside the Canadian border. It was a strange experience: we were sitting on our sofa in Eastleigh, with the laptop on the coffee table, and there were these lovely people speaking words of wisdom. Odd, but very comforting.

It reminded me of the days when I used to teach Co-counselling. Co-co was (is) a form of self-help emotional support where you attend a course to learn the skills and the culture and then subsequently you join a co-counselling community (not a physical community, like NFCH, but a local, national or world-wide community of co-counsellors) and can always find someone to work with, and/or be with, without it feeling like a culture shock. Once trained as a co-counsellor you can always find social comfort in group of other co-counsellors.

I recently realised that I can divide co-counselling into two pieces: the psychological part and the social part. These days I have many disagreements with the psychological part, but the social part I now see is highly relevant to our current endeavour.

Back in the day the Winchester co-counselling community used to suspend meetings in the summer (everyone was away on holiday) and I can still remember that first meeting in September, being back in the group, with a heart-felt “ahhh”. Like sinking into a warm bath. The culture that we had built for our group—our community—was profoundly comfortable.

I want more of that, and so I would like to offer NFCH a one-day course on culture setting. I propose to call it “Are we comfortable yet?” It will be highly experiential—no Power-points, no handouts, no manuals, no “propositional knowledge”. Hopefully, it will be fun (you can never predict these things). There will be lots of exercises and some games. Sometimes you may not be able to tell which is which. We will ask participants to wear loose, comfortable clothing, and to bring food to share at lunchtime. There will be no guidance or rules about what food you bring. If quinoa salad is your thing, fine, and if you want to bring a bucket of KFC, also fine.

I propose that the workshop is free to all attendees, and there is also a “tip bucket”. People will be asked to contribute as much as they can afford to cover the cost of the venue, drinks, and expenses.

My ideal number of attendees is 12, simply because it’s the best number if you have small-group work (you can have groups of 2, 3, 4, 6). It is usually my luck that if I aim for 12 I get 11 or 13: the prime numbers either side! The biggest group I ever ran was 72, which took a big room, some nimble planning-on-the-fly on my part, and a resolution not to do that again! I have run these groups for the universities of Surrey, Southampton, and Bath, various GP surgeries, and many private groups.

We could run this on either a Saturday or a Sunday (or both if the demand is high enough). 

To register interest for the course, please click this link.