Time is the fuel of community.
As I was drinking my morning coffee this morning I looked
out the window and across the street my neighbor was loading his pickup truck
to go to work while another neighbor, who was in the process of walking her
dog, stopped to chat and a third neighbor joined the conversation.
Three neighbors taking a moment.
Nobody put it on the calendar, it isn’t a scheduled event,
but around here neighbors stop all the time to be… just neighborly. It happens so much I think most of us expect
it, even several times a day. We get to
know who is walking which dogs when, or will be out working in the yard. One
neighbor sits on a bench in the front yard every day smoking a cigar and
reading the newspaper. I could do without the cigar part, and I am guessing so
could his wife – which is why it’s a good thing he is out in the front yard.
But the point is, there he is. And I
know it. All I need to do is take a moment and be a neighbor.
Even better, because we interact regularly in the
neighborhood, “folks drop by.” Really, they do. No invitations. For no reason,
our neighbors will come over and chat for a bit. We do the same. But it doesn’t start that way. I think we would all be a bit surprised if a
neighbor we hadn’t interacted with much just dropped by to say hi. It starts with “Hello” from time to time,
then stopping to chat, then leads to neighbors who are part of your everyday
life.
And that all begins with finding time.
I really believe our overall mind set is “I don’t have
time.” But you do. You have exactly the
same number of minutes in a day as anyone else. And while some things, like our
jobs, take hours out of every day, it takes less than a second to say hello,
less than a minute to ask how the other is doing, and five minutes to stop
by. We DO have time for that.
If we only take the moment it takes to think about it that
way.