Walking Around To Hear Stories
A couple of days ago I watched a young Calgary woman, Heather Prosak, walk the streets of Ottawa sharing her story as an observer of the Canadian truckers protest convoy. Here she is.
Notice that she felt that she had to come to see for herself what was happening. She walked the streets, talked with people, listened to their stories, and found a happiness that she had not felt in two years.
Similar story as to why people left their homes to help in the Katrina recovery. They found meaning for their lives in the direct connection with people and their needs.
I have traveled a lot over the course of my career. Everywhere I go I talk to people and they tell me stories. Some are stories of success, some of heartbreak, others of tragedy and recovery. Many of the stories that people tell me are about their community. Recently, I have heard a lot of stories about economic hardship, of closed businesses, empty storefronts, of loved ones lost to COVID, and people moving away from their communities to find work.
Being Neighborly
The Canadian Truckers Convoy protest reminds me of the outpouring of human caring that I saw during my visits to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I drove down from North Carolina to get a direct impression of the recovery efforts. My intention was to blog about what I saw to encourage people, and in particular churches from around the country to bring service teams to help. To make that happen, I had to know the people who would be their contact point in the area of devastation.
There I met a family from Tennessee who sold their house and moved into a small apartment in a bunker under a football stadium so that they could serve the recovery volunteers.
I met a remarkable woman from Illinois who locked up her house, left with a bag of clothes in one hand and a bag of tools in the other, and hitched a ride with a trucker down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. When she got there she began to help with construction work. When she found out that many people did not have insurance to replace their homes, and the local government was eager to move on and get back to business, she created a non-profit organization to repair the houses that didn’t have sufficient insurance. The last I checked the organization still help people with their housing needs.
Finally, the Mississippi Gulf Coast Habitat for Humanity chapter became the second largest in the country because of the need to replace lost homes. The neighborliness of people from all over the country made it a story to tell back home about what is possible when people have a shared purpose for impact.
This neighborliness happens whenever some kind of tragedy strikes. Neighbors from far away gather to serve neighbors they did not know, but who needed them. Their stories touch us as representative of the best parts of our humanity.
Restoring Neighborliness
The pandemic of the past two years has awakened people worldwide to the importance of the social structure of their communities. Especially in places where lockdowns have persisted, the story became one of social isolation and economic hardship. And it continues today. People tell me about how hard it is to communicate when communities and families are separated by the politics of vaccination.
The reawakening of the importance of community connects us to stories that can make a difference in our lives. An insignificant story that we heard three years ago now takes on meaning because the context of our lives has changed. Then we could not be satisfied with watching TikTok videos and reading celebrity Twitter feeds. Now, things are different. We know that we need a deeper connection to our families and friends. When we get together, we tell ourselves stories about what has been happening.
One of my new neighbors introduce me to his fifteen-year-old daughter at a social event the other night. She is a bright, intelligent young woman. As we talked about her experience through the pandemic, she said that the problem with online interaction is that you never see the body language of people. She told me that 95% of communication is non-verbal. This is why even masks have had a detrimental effect on people.
Our direct connections provide us a way to know people in the fullness of their life. When you need someone to drive you to the doctor or bring you a meal when you get sick, you can call Uber. It will be your neighbor who is going to check on you later. They will call you when they need you to drive them to the airport or help move a sofa in their house. This is what neighbors do.
We don’t think of these things as being as important as our social media connections. The myth of social media is that it is how can be a globally connected people. No one wants to feel like they are out of the loop. The reality is that genuine relationships of respect, trust, and mutual accountability cannot develop without direct interaction.
Heather Prosak wanted a direct connection to the truckers. She wanted to hear their stories. It changed her life. You could see how she talked about herself. She has a story to tell others. More importantly, she has a story to tell herself.
Coming Next
There are two more facets of this topic that are important.
One is about precisely what is the story we should be telling ourselves.
And the second, how do you know anything at all about the world without having some direct engagement with it.
I’ll post on both of these topics during the next few days.