More than a month has passed since move in day over here at the Ruscliffe. It's been a crazy time. Gathering belongings from multiple locations. Lots of boxes still around, especially in the garage. Furniture staged in the living room since final resting places aren't yet determined or aren't ready. The downstairs looks like a bomb blast as we've begun the early stages of remodeling. The counter is always full of random stuff, since official storage places for lots of things haven't yet been sorted out. Everyone's has a bedroom, and the kitchen and main living areas are clear enough that life can proceed. But it's all definitely got a bit of a temporary and cluttered feel to it.
The early stages of this experiment are largely about getting things in place. We're up to our eyes in it. But the complexity really takes off when you consider that all of us have to stay on top of our regular everyday lives. Work. Cell groups. Leadership responsibilities. Family connections. Child care, soon to include preschool. Bills have to be paid - not lost in the random piles on the counter. Regular home maintenance has to be done. After all, the yard doesn't stop growing just because you have remodeling going on. So we're navigating the early stages of how to manage it all - and stay in a good relational space.
One of the first hurdles we're tackling is how to be on the same page with each other. There are lots of comings and goings. Different work schedules. Different extra-curricular activities. Different friends and family coming over to hang out. Add to this all the different expectations all of us have about freedom, flexibility, house cleaning, and community. It is so easy to just let the flow of life take over and find that without meaning to do it, we're passing each other disconnected and with conflicting agendas.
In order to tackle this head on, the Schelske's and Ouchida-Walshes ended the summer with a camping trip. One of the main agendas of this time was to sit down and talk through another round of "how life ought to go" here at the Ruscliffe. We'd talked a lot about ideal situations in the past, and big ideas about why we wanted to do this. But now we needed to sort out some of the practical realities. This conversation led to a number of things we've implemented as our first attempts.
Household Meals. In the studies of the various kinds of intentional community housing situations that are successful one common link has been found: regular, committed, shared meals. The average is three each week. These meals keep us connected, and provide a safe place for working out the details of life together. We decided to start with two, since we eat together informally all the time. First, we've committed to a Sunday morning breakfast. This meal will be just for the household, and is as close as you can get to required in a voluntary situation. We prep the meal together, eat, and then take some time for a weekly house meeting. The second is an open meal on Tuesday nights. We've committed to eat together with the expectation that anyone can invite friends to join. It will be interesting to see how we evolve a sustainable menu selection that is affordable as we invite lots more people to share the table with us over the weeks and months.
Shared Cleaning Responsibilities. Since we all live in the house, we all have some responsibility for keeping it clean. To get things started we committed to two different processes for regular cleaning, so that the work doesn't fall to the people with the lowest tolerance of clutter. After dinner every night, anyone who is home will help clean up from dinner and help with 30 minutes of a gentle reset and refresh of the main living spaces. Friday, late afternoon, everyone is committing to a 2-hour block of house cleaning and maintenance. So far we're going with an honor system for people who can't make it. They will contribute at another time.
Sharing Information. One of the complexities we've uncovered is that there's a lot going on in all of our lives and it can be tough to be on the same page. All the shared responsibilities suffer, and information (Did you get the electric bill? Is it paid? When did that happen?) gets lost in the mix. So, to keep our heads screwed on straight we created an information corner. It includes a 4-month calender to track events that impact the household, job lists, emergency contact info, reminders, and a big white-board for communicating with each other, along with a little desk area that has a place for keys, charging our electronics, and sorting our mail. I'm sure this information center will evolve as we get more practiced at this. We'll find we don't need some of these things, and find other things that we need.
We have a long way to go in sorting out all the details, but at least we know that we're going to be on the same page as we go. We expect that our weekly check in and the new information center will be crucial in staying on the same page.
In the big picture a couple shared meals, shared cleaning and an information center don't seem like that important. And we don't really know yet either. But we don't want our ideals and goals to suffer at the hands of day-in-day-out living. We didn't embark on this adventure in order to have more room mates. We made this decision because we wanted to try a different way of living, and see if we could create more margin in our lives for the things that matter most to us. So, these are some practical tools - crutches really - to help us as we put our time and effort where our ideals are.
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