Being Neighborly

In the early days of this country when it wasn’t yet a country, travelers often looked for nearby private homes when night approached because there were no inns available. They could expect someplace warm to sleep and maybe a meal for which they would pay. Indigenous tribes chose certain friends on whom to depend just as the Europeans did. Misjudgments happened.

Recently, as natural disasters and even wars strike not always without warning but always without specific parameters, people are forced to seek help where compassion and loyalty are willing to provide it. On a much smaller, less threatening scale, most of us don’t enjoy the kind of close knit neighborhoods we might have had when we were small. Even today, when snows trap traffic jams in passage-less blizzards, or wildfires or floods destroy escape routes,  good hearts look out for one another, saving lives. We know official emergency workers can’t do it all quickly enough. Heroes walk among us daily. Now and then, we surprise ourselves.

Neighborly concern can’t be limited to physical disasters. We don’t have to search much to discover victims of despair who’ve been mistreated by the rush of the mainstream. Suicide numbers rise when people of any age or culture feel hopeless. Happily, many of us have friends to whom we can turn when our emotional limitations have been breached. Admitting vulnerability isn’t easy if we’ve focused on work and independence and achievement for years. But everyone from the richest or most celebrated to the least noticed needs emotional shelter from time to time. We need to know we aren’t crazy or weak or alone. Human needs are common to all humans. Artificial cures touted by cagey advertisers—even pills hawked by online scams or mercenary professionals—cannot effectively replace human caring long term. They can only mask the need, an action which eventually degrades health and destroys happiness. Loneliness kills.

We must be willing to provide comradery and/or emotional shelter for others as well as ourselves to enrich our society. We need to believe we and they are worth the effort. Oddly, believing in ourselves first may be the most difficult assignment. We’re told from an early age that we aren’t enough without (fill in the suggestion). Programs meant to educate us or even teach morals often accidentally teach us we aren’t smart enough or good enough, instead. The only saving grace is that we’re told we’re better than SOME who don’t conform. A runaway desire to control by designers and thought leaders can pervert positive intentions. Empty minds make docile workers or citizens or parishioners. Obedience is an unworthy goal for a species so filled with potential.

Once we accept that we deserve to feel good, we can reach out to others to convince them of the same. And if we’re successful, we finally realize that helping can outstrip other achievements in satisfaction. We are, as are the animals, pack. Together, we discover avenues we never suspected existed when we divided up the population. False divisions make us less. Wars destroy our best intentions so only the winning leaders have a chance to prosper…temporarily.

I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve only recently learned to open my heart to those around me who can accept caring from a stranger. It’s my best idea in years. In spite of receiving stacks of elegant pleas for donations, my family can’t cure all the ills of the earth. Elon Musk can’t, if he wanted to, without the cooperation of others. But we can brighten one corner that might brighten another corner by association… and so on and so on and so on.