Somewhere along the line we traded our front porches for back decks prioritized our privacy over proximity as We built higher fences both literally and metaphorically, Our interactions became curated and convenient with a quick text, a comment on a social media post with such The messy, beautiful, and unpredictable nature of spontaneous human connection was gradually engineered out of our lives for the sake of efficiency. But one of the things my reading reminded me is we crave what we’ve lost I felt a pang of that during the early days of the pandemic Suddenly, we were all at home. And for the first time in years people were out in their yards walking their neighborhoods and making eye contact. We were desperate for that human connection however fleeting and from a six-foot distance We remembered that a community is more than just a group of people living in the same zip code it’s a network of shared experience.
I’m not suggesting we all need to become best friends with everyone on the block I’ll be the first to admit I cherish my quiet private space. But what if we tried to bend the curve just a little What if we made a conscious effort to be on the other side of the fence for five more minutes, as It starts with a choice to be slightly less busy, to be a little more open. Maybe it’s putting a couple of extra chairs on the porch as an unspoken invitation or Maybe it’s asking a question beyond “How are you?” and actually waiting to hear the answer we may also organizing a ridiculously simple block party, because sometimes it takes a shared burger to remind us that we’re all just people, navigating the same chaos hoping for a little bit of kindness.
The greetings don’t have to be the end of the story
They can be the very first sentence just like reading this post without saying hi.
Image created by META AI