I have worked in many teams, and configurations thereof, in my life. As someone whose personality thrives on connecting with people and coming together with others to co-create and achieve shared goals I have mostly found enjoyable moments and aspects about it, even in the face of challenges.
Today I reflected upon how much I genuinely and consistently love working with one of the teams I get to volunteer with this year. Realizing that it is only twice in my life that I have experienced a level of consistent joy and delight in working as a team: once when volunteering in Bangkok and right now with my colleagues at Why Not Integration.
Both have 3 marked and important-to-me aspects about them:
1. The causes or goals which unite us are social and have a clear humanistic foundation.
2. The teams are not only diverse in terms of ethnicity but also made up of people who live inter-culturality (thanks to years of residency in one or several countries outside of their home land).
3. There is a playful and compassionate way of engaging and working with each other.
The latter being one of the most fundamental reasons I struggled when I returned to Hamburg and felt the loss of that treasure. Being surrounded by people who share a lived experience, or at best an embodied experience, of inter-culturality has been one of the greatest and healing gifts my Bangkok years bestowed upon me. To be without has been painful and drained much of the color and joy out of life for me. Not because anything about my German friends is lacking but because it nurtures my being to *also* be surrounded by people who share this qualitative experience and engage with it with playful awareness. And no, this isn’t limited to people of my skin color or ancestral heritage.
What a joy to enter, weave and co-create spaces and communities, which are built on these deliciously generative qualities and delight in the way ’my people’ come alive and sparkle with inspiration and kindness in them. It constitutes a another kind of sweet home coming to my home city and keeps giving me life and fuels my passions with a welcome sustainability. Which is why my nomad soul has settled happily in being here.
With deep gratitude for the way life keeps unfolding for and through my being.
