Happy fall, everyone.
I know it's still summer for a few more weeks, technically. But I feel the hustle and bustle of September, and I can't help but feel the change of season inside. For a lot of you, school has been back for weeks now. Vacations are drifting into the background, the non-stop rhythm of the school year is already in motion, and the calendar can say what it likes.
Fall is here.
I know we've bounced around in scope in these essays so far this year. Here at the beginning of the school year, in the midst of all that hustle and bustle, I think it's easy to lose touch with what's going on in our local community. So I want to offer you a story I found genuinely encouraging, about how staying connected to the people around you can be easier than you might imagine.
Priya Parker, who wrote The Art of Gathering, was on a podcast I listened to earlier this year. She told a story about a woman named Robin who lives on a block outside Chicago.
Robin wanted to get to know her neighbors. So she went to VistaPrint and ordered some invitations. She got bagels and coffee for a Saturday morning at her house, and then she sent her six and eight-year-old daughters out on their scooters to hang a paper coffee cup on every door on the block, with Saturday's date and the invitation on it.
The invitation asked for three things:
their email address
how many years they had lived on the block
two interesting facts about themselves
When people showed up, each of them got two name tags. The first had their own name and the number of years they had lived there. The second had a few facts about someone else, another neighbor standing right there in the same yard. Which meant nobody could just stand and hold their coffee. They had to go find that person to get the conversation started.
Then, as people were starting to leave, Robin brought out a cake with the number 342 written on it. That was the total number of years that everyone who had decided to come had lived on that block. Three hundred and forty-two years in the same neighborhood, and most of them had never met.
What I think the story shows, and what Parker's advice would tell you, is that the biggest thing you can do to get to know your neighbors is to start doing it. I know I've said this a lot. But I don't think it's a matter of waiting for the right house, or the right season of life, or full confidence that anybody would come. If you wait until it's perfect, you are never going to do it.
Back in our May essay I wrote about three verbs:
join the institutions that already exist
start the ones that don't
restore the ones that have crumbled
In August we talked about attention, and trust, and somebody deciding to go first. I think Robin's story is a picture of what going first can actually look like.
So for all I care, steal her idea outright. If that one doesn't fit you, here are a few that ask even less:
Put a folding table and a pot of coffee at the end of your driveway on a Saturday morning, and text the four closest houses the night before. No invitations, no printing, no scooters.
Pull some chairs around a fire pit on the first genuinely cool Friday in October and tell people to bring their own. Cold weather does half the hosting for you.
Use Halloween. It is already the one night of the year when everyone on your street is outside and walking slowly. Set a table at the end of the driveway with cider for the parents, and you will talk to more of your neighbors in two hours than you have all year.
I would challenge you that, between now and Thanksgiving, you try to host one thing. It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't even have to be all that good. But I'll be honest with you, I think most people are going to be surprised at somebody trying to do something like this at all, and I think you will be surprised by the generosity of the response.
And then tell us about it. If you decide to take us up on this, I would love to hear how it went.
I hope you go find the people you can have 342 years of history with, right outside your door.
