Success and failure are in the eyes of the person characterizing them.
Success and failure always have collective benefits and implications.
Failure is just success waiting to happen. “Mistakes are just knowledge waiting to happen.” (The latter is a quote I heard on a home renovation show I saw a few times; the celebrity is a young woman who builds houses out of old scraps and discarded windows etc. If I can find her name I will add it here. She’s so bright and positive.)
Anything that fails can be tweaked. Keep your eye on the goal or intention, and do the next thing. In Japanese it’s referred to as kaizen. A process of continuous ongoing improvement. (This term has also been adopted by the English-language worlds in business and industry.)
Any success, no matter how small and specific, can be reverse-engineered for replication and wider application.
This post was prompted by a widespread limiting belief in the Permaculture and Collapse communities, that community is just too hard to do.
It’s not. And there are successes. As one example, a colleague of mine has lived in long-term collegial partnership in a home on a Permaculture education farm. Obviously their partnership is working and durable. The success could be reverse engineered. What is causing it to work? What makes things work in the long run.
I have the same example regarding my two long-term housemates. They have worked out really well and our assets not only to our shared home but also to our community. Now, in today’s world, these living arrangements often have a natural ending point, for example, if someone Hass to leave to go take care of a relative or for some other life change. But I can generalize some of the conditions that have led to the success, when it’s time to have to search for new housemates.
I don’t have any ironclad rules offhand, but one thing that seems to work is to be very clear upfront about what the intentions of this household are, and make sure that we have sufficient alignment even when not all fellow residents share the same goals.
For example, this house and I have a hardcore goal of extreme thriftiness, and aspiring to 100% landfill diversion. Not everybody who lives here feels as strongly as I do, but it’s possible for us to have sufficient alignment that it works.
Your successes are our successes. Your “failures” are an illusion. Failures are just something that didn’t get tweaked yet toward the optimum. Keep going! And share what works. Also share what doesn’t work. It’s an ongoing group task for all of us.