What does it mean to be ‘citizening’?

By Rachel Musson

For those who know me well, you’ll know that if you ever want to hang out on a Wednesday, I’m almost always likely to say no. Not because I have a thing about Wednesdays, but because I have a thing about choir.

Last year I joined Totnes Harmony– a beautiful community choir in my hometown of Totnes, and in doing so have pretty much transformed my life. In joining this choir, I found not only the utter alchemical-joy of singing glorious four-part harmonies with 70 other folk each week, but also a deep, deep feeling of belonging.

Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. It is one of our fundamental human needs, something we’re wired for and something that we can find ourselves feeling unconsciously starved of until it is satisfied. For myself, this sense of deep belonging is a feeling I have been yearning to find again ever since I left teaching.

Any of you working within a school will, I hope, feel a sense of belonging that such a community can offer. I used to love knowing and being connected to a large part of the community in the schools I worked with, having deep connections with colleagues, students and parents and feeling part of something much bigger than myself, whilst also recognising what I brought to the whole.

Being seen, known, feeling a part of something, feeling that we matter – these are precious feelings that do something to settle our nervous system and allow us to feel more whole. I desperately missed this sense of community when I left the classroom and so finding this same sense of belonging in my home town through choir is satisfying something deeply primal within me.

In addition to this is the active ‘citizening’ that is also emerging for me through this community. I’ve recently stepped up into a voluntary role on the choir’s steering committee, helping to organise and manage the weekly logistics to bring 70 people together in one place to sing. I’ve also been building us a new website which goes live this weekend and has been such a joyful thing to bring to life, honouring the magic of our musical director and the beauty of all of the individual members of this community.

I really like the idea of citizening being an active verb, an idea and invitation offered by Baratunde Thurston who hosts a podcast called How to Citizen which is full of delicious wisdom to listen to and absorb.

Citizening is something we do to support folks around us and contribute to the idea of a ‘larger us’. Many of the stories in our dominant cultures define us as ‘consumers’ rather than citizens. Our global media has an undertone of division in its rhetoric, encouraging us to ‘other’ people, to divide, to judge, to fear. Coupled with this is the invitation to see life as something we are entitled to, rather than something we contribute towards. I love the framing that Jon Alexander* brings here in his work, exploring how over time our dominant culture has encouraged us to inhabit particular roles as we shifted from being subjects to consumers to (hopefully) returning to being citizens.  

Subjects are dependent
Consumers are independent
Citizens are interdependent

* Explore the work of Jon Alexander here

When we shift our perception to see ourselves as citizens rather than consumers, we welcome a shift in how we think about ourselves, the role we have to play in the world and how wish to show up in our communities. It allows us to see ourselves as part of a ‘larger us’ and to feel a sense of belonging and agency in shaping the world we’re moving into. By becoming a citizen (rather than consumer) we move from being independent to interdependent, enabling much healthier connections and relationships in our lives.

“Citizenship is the chance to make a difference to the place where you belong.”
- Charles Handy

When I walk down the high-street these days, I find I am saying hello to a heck of a lot more people than ever before. The lady in the bookshop sings in the soprano section of the choir; the window-cleaner is one of the tenors, the woman who owns the café sits behind me in the altos. I find myself having an ever-increasing sense of both rootedness into place, widening into connection and opening into care, feeling part of something much bigger than myself.

Who knew that having a little sing on a Wednesday could be quite so profound…