DEUCE Community Update: October 2023
This past month has held many lessons for DEUCE Community. We’ve navigated through several tough transitions with partners and with housing. Doing so has forced us to assess where and how we can be the most effective and create the most amount of value for men and women who are system, substance, and housing impacted.
Reflecting on the past month and where we are at as an organization leaves me with a distinct takeaway.
As much as we want it to be, progress is not linear.
For me, the rub is, ’as much as we want it to be’. Too often, I hold fixed frameworks in my mind. These frameworks can sometimes be useful, but only to a point. One framework that can be ineffective for me is thinking that progress in life is like climbing a mountain. This can be a useful point of view in that it motivates me to keep moving or climbing. However, it is certainly ineffective when the path stops moving up when it feels like life has circled back around and I find myself at the base of the mountain yet again.
A new point of view I am trying to take is that life is more like a spiral. It always circles back around to a new beginning. The principles always stay the same, even though the scenery changes. This model holds more grace for variables outside of my control, yet also allows for more ownership of the things outside of my control. A spiral has no peak; no endpoint. And, even though it keeps circling back around to remind us of ourselves, it’s still a hell of a ride.
This circling back sometimes feels like a transcendence and sometimes like a regression. The more I think about it, the less important I think it is whether the circle is ascending or descending. The real question to ask is, “Is the spiral bringing me closer to myself?”
For my money, that is what life is all about: becoming ourselves.
As a young organization, we are still very much stepping into ourselves and who we want to be in the world. Sometimes, challenge can feel like it’s bringing us further away from where we want to be. My reframe is that challenge is bringing us closer to ourselves and that is the first big step to having a real impact on the world.
Campbell Lillard
DEUCE Community Inc. Co-Founder
Upcoming Fundraiser | Featuring art by Vava Ribeiro keep an eye out for upcoming dates
Every Saturday at 1:00 p.m. | Community Workout at DEUCE Gym @ 110 Lincoln Blvd
Community Dinner | Temporarily discontinued until we settle at our new location in La Cienega Heights
The Amazon Prime packages that show up on the porch of the DEUCE Community House mean more to these guys than you can possibly imagine. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. View Amazon Wishlist.