Why I Am Trying to Stop Saying Connection

I’ve been using the word “connection” a lot throughout this adventure. Connection to self. Connection to others. Connection to place. It’s become one of my go-to words for describing what love looks like in action.

But recently, I have been thinking about it differently.

Connection can be one-way.

I can feel connected to you without you feeling connected to me. Someone can feel a deep connection to a person who doesn’t even know they exist. That’s not a flaw in the word. It’s what the word actually means. It describes how energy moves in one direction. From me to you. From you to something. But not necessarily back.

Relationship is different. Relationship is always reciprocal.

You can have unhealthy relationships and healthy relationships. But you can’t have a one-way relationship. If the moment’s one-way, it’s not really a relationship anymore. It’s something else.

Why This Matters for Community

I’ve been working on a deeper piece about community. Trying to name the core elements that actually make community work. I kept landing on four things. Relationship to self. Relationship to others. Relationship to place. Relationship to resources.

For a while I was calling them connections. Connection to self. Connection to others. Connection to the planet. But once I saw the difference, I couldn’t unsee it.

If you’re building community on connection, you might be building something that only flows in one direction. I connect with you. You don’t connect with me. That’s not community. That’s an audience.

Community requires reciprocity. It requires something flowing between people, not just from one to another. That’s relationship.

Where Love and Fear Fit

This is where I think it gets interesting. Once you frame it as relationship, the love and fear lens maps right onto it.

Healthy relationships are driven by love. They make both people better. The energy flows and grows. Unhealthy relationships are driven by fear. They deplete. They control. They extract.

Think about what fear-based relationships look like at scale. That’s where you get racism. White supremacy. Environmental destruction. Systems built on extraction rather than reciprocity. Fear drives all of it.

And love-based relationships? That’s where you get healing. Growth. The kind of community where people actually tend each other’s fires.

Love and fear aren’t just emotions in this framework. They’re the quality of energy flowing through every relationship we’re in. With ourselves. With each other. With the places we live. With the resources we share.

The Energy in a Fight

My wife Becca has been reading The Celestine Prophecy. One night at dinner, she told me about a scene that had landed with her.

In the book, a character learns to see energy flowing between people. Then he witnesses two people arguing. And what he sees is that the argument isn’t really about ideas. It’s about energy. Each person is trying to extract energy from the other. The one who wins the argument gets a surge. The one who loses feels depleted.

That’s a fear-based relationship in action. I need to win. I need your energy. I need to take something from you so I can feel full.

The book suggests that part of our growth as humans is learning to stop doing that. To stop trying to extract energy from each other and instead find a source that doesn’t require someone else to lose.

I sat with that for a while. Because that’s exactly what I’ve been writing about. When there’s good energy flowing between people, it’s rooted in love. We’re making each other better. Like Becca and me at that dinner table. Great energy between us. Nobody taking. Both giving.

But when we come from fear, when we need to win the argument or control the outcome, we’re essentially trying to take someone else’s energy and use it to fill ourselves up. The other person walks away depleted.

What I’m Sitting With

I didn’t discover anything new here. If you look critically at how our society is structured, at the isolation and extraction and fear baked into so many of our systems, it’s almost impossible to land anywhere other than the conclusion that we need something different. Something built on reciprocal relationship rather than one-way extraction.

These thoughts are still forming. But the language shift from connection to relationship feels important. It’s not just semantics. It changes what you’re building toward. Connection can look like love while still being one-way. Relationship can’t fake it. It’s either reciprocal or it’s not.

I think community has to be built on the thing that can’t fake it. Relationships.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org