by Kate Gaston
"Right now, at this very moment, in the exact place you happen to be, you’re surrounded by real people. You live where you live. This is your superpower."
After almost a decade of cross-country moves—with all that tearing up of tender roots and transplanting every two to three years—by the time my family landed in Nashville, I was jonesing for a home of our own. A house with a yard. A neighborhood with sidewalks. And neighbors walking on those sidewalks who’d know my name and stop to say hello.
In the fullness of time, we did indeed buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with sidewalks. And yes, our neighbors do walk on those sidewalks. And, occasionally, they stop to say hello. But mostly, they stop to let their dogs pee on my zinnias.
Our house has a small front porch, and in the afternoons, I enjoy sitting outside, sipping coffee and reading. On one such afternoon, not long after we moved into our new home, I was in my usual spot when I heard a noise. It seemed to be coming from the house next door. It was my neighbor’s front door knob, wiggling back and forth ineffectively, being turned from the inside. After much jiggling, the doorknob finally caught, and the door creaked open. Out shuffled an old man leaning on a walker. A frizzy nimbus of sparse white hair sprouted from his head. This, as I was just about to find out, was Joe.
I turned, waved, and said hello to the man. He didn't appear to hear me, intent as he was on checking his mailbox. It was empty. I’d also come to find out that Joe’s mailbox would almost always be empty. That fact didn’t deter him from making the arduous journey every day.
Giving a little huff of disappointment, the man turned his walker back toward the front door for his return voyage. This was the moment he spotted me on my porch, and his eyes lit with delight. He crooned—yes, literally crooned—“HellooOOoooo!” I waved and said hello a second time. He stopped and turned toward me with a half-expectant, half-vacant gaze.
My parents raised me right, so I couldn’t just turn back to my reading. Not with this little man chirping and crooning at me as he shuffled along. So, I put my book and coffee down and walked across my driveway, stopping below his front stoop. Here, I’d make yet another discovery: even from this meager distance, and with me bellowing at him at a volume flirting dangerously close to disturbance-of-the-peace levels, Joe still couldn’t hear a thing.
He nodded agreeably as he pretended that he could hear me, then volleyed back a string of questions that were only marginally related to anything I’d said. These were not your garden variety questions, easily answered with a head shake or nod. They were not the sort of questions that could be answered at all when one member of the conversation is mostly deaf but pretending not to be. It would go a little something like this:
Joe: Do your parents root for Bear Bryant?
Me: No, not really.
Joe: What?
Me, screaming: No, not really!
Joe: Do you know where Mike Pence is from?
Me, still screaming: Not the first clue!
Joe: Do you like Cracker Barrel?
Me: Good biscuits. I’d give it a 4 on a 10 scale.
Joe: What?
Me, cranking the volume up another notch: Good biscuits!!!
Joe: What?
Me: GOOOOOD!!!! *deep breath* BISCUITS!!!!!
Joe: *Nods vaguely*
At last, Joe reached the end of what I’d come to find out was his repertoire of questions. Then, without missing a beat, he concluded our first meeting by asking if I’d run over to Burger King for him. He’d take a Whopper, fries, and a sweet tea. With that, he shuffled back inside his house.
I cast a wistful glance back at my coffee, my book, my peaceful porch.
Then, I drove down the street to Burger King and got the man his food.
Though Joe can’t hear much, he possesses a super-sensory ability for catching me on my front porch. Every time he does—and I mean every time—our visits follow a familiar pattern. His front doorknob starts jiggling from the inside, and Joe makes his way, slowly, treacherously, out onto his front stoop. He sees me and croons hello. I wave a friendly greeting from my porch, then turn back to my book, hoping against hope that he’ll read the social cues and let me read in peace.
No dice.
Our Liturgy For the Imposition of Neighborliness continues to play out, with Joe squawking a question about vice presidential trivia at me and me screaming an answer back at him. Of course, Joe can’t hear me, so I’m obliged to put my book and coffee down, walk over to his porch, and have a high-volume conversation about Mike Pence’s hometown.
(It’s Columbus, Indiana, in case you’re wondering.)
Usually, our exchanges end with Joe asking what I’m cooking for dinner and if I’d bring him a plate.
Here’s something I’m not proud to admit. One afternoon, a few weeks into our relationship, I heard the telltale sound of Joe’s front door knob jiggling. In those precious seconds before he could get his door open, I grabbed my phone, held it up to my face in a way he couldn’t fail to notice, and—heaven help me— pretended to be having a conversation. He waved, gazed forlornly in my direction for a few moments, then shuffled back into his house.
I understand this behavior disqualifies me from heaven. It’s just that, sometimes, I want to be able to read on my front porch in peace without having to think about Mike Pence. It’s not that I don’t like Mike Pence. It’s not that I don’t like Joe. However, interacting with Joe is uncomfortable and highly inefficient.
Here’s the rub. Joe is my neighbor. Not just in the vague, hand-wavy, New Testament sense of the word. Joe is my neighbor in the sense that he literally lives next door.
Though Joe tells me he has kinfolk, they live far away and don’t visit very often. Joe can’t leave his house because he can’t navigate the steps on his walker. Joe orders pizza delivery every couple of days, which is, I think, how he gets through the week. I’ve taken dinner over to him a handful of times, and once, when I opened his refrigerator, its emptiness broke through the thick layer of apathy that had iced over my heart.
Joe, my neighbor, is hungry and alone.
Why am I telling you this sad story? Because this story illustrates something about the reality we exist within. Welcome, dear reader, to modernity.
Modernity is the period of human existence we currently inhabit, yes, but it’s more than that. It’s come to be characterized by mankind’s giant strides forward in rational thought, individualism, and industrialization. Modernity is, as David Foster Wallace so aptly put it, the water we’re swimming in.
Great minds have spilled seas of ink on the colossal woes of modernity. Charles Taylor has traced modernity from its genesis and written the whole sordid tale within his book, A Secular Age. If you’ve got a month or two of spare time, it’s a profound read. Or, if you only have an hour, Andrew Fellows boils down the dark magic of modernity in this lecture.
It’s all well and good for philosophers to wax eloquent on the subject of modernity; that’s what they’re paid to do. It is enough for you and I to simply recognize its fruit. Modernity is a cultural juggernaut that causes us, among other things, to lean away from people who desperately need us to lean in. It is a subtle force that conspires to isolate and alienate us from our neighbors. It moves us away from shared meals, away from conversations. It builds walls between us and the sights, smells, and needs of our neighbors, insulating us from the inefficiencies and discomforts of interacting with them.
I’m not saying modernity is all bad. People used to die from infected toenails, for crying out loud. Give me those sweet, sweet antibiotics, baby. And life before anesthesia? Before Tylenol? No, thank you. How about deodorant? GPS? Insta-Pots? All good things.
But despite all its advances, there’s rot in the golden apple of modernity. This isn’t a surprise. We’re all familiar with its darker elements. Rip-roaring loneliness. Debilitating anxiety. Neighbors who don’t know each other’s names. Kids who have forgotten the way to Neverland. Siloed political parties, social media echo chambers, and, worst of all, cyber trucks.
The problems are so big, so far-reaching, most of us can’t really even grasp how we got here. Perhaps you’re like me, and the overwhelming problems feel, well, overwhelming. Perhaps, also like me, you feel your efforts are so meager, so paltry, that you’re tempted just to close your eyes and let modernity do whatever terrible and soulless thing it's going to do.
It would be easy to roll over. It would be simple to put our heads down, to allow the alienation and isolation of our cultural moment to continue unchecked, to dash into our homes as soon as we hear our neighbor’s door knob jiggling.
Robert Farrar Capon, in his pithy little book The Third Peacock: the Problem of God and Evil, said:
“Man is…just one more insignificant piece of stuff lost in a crowd of vastly bigger but equally insignificant pieces…he cowers like a skid row bum on the doorstep of an indifferent creation. He longs for a square meal and a kind word, but he’s afraid to believe it when he hears it.”
Here, then, is the gift you and I have to give. It’s the ability to offer that square meal and a kind word to the person standing in front of us. We can swing wide our doors and welcome whoever happens to be standing nearby. We can invite people in.
Why?
Because our neighbors need us. They are hungry, and they are alone.
Inviting people into the raw, unfiltered truth of our lives is not easy. It’s actually really, really hard. For one thing, it forces us to kiss efficiency goodbye. Efficiency is a lovely thing. But when it comes to building relationships, it’s not a helpful metric. Sometimes, it can actually hurt the process and the people involved.
Let’s get real for a minute, shall we? We get impatient when the wifi is slow. When Netflix buffers, our blood pressure spikes. We get huffy when people don't respond in a timely manner to the text we’ve sent them. And by “timely manner,” I mean, like, right now. Such is our need, our addiction, to immediate gratification. Waiting makes us twitchy.
Building relationships with other humans is the equivalent of old-school dial-up. It requires us to be in close proximity. We emit weird, unnecessary noises as our social modems attempt to connect. Our communication is slow, ponderous. It is fraught with misunderstanding and often unstable. When interacting with other humans, we are forced to wait, to slow down, to move at what feels like a glacial pace.
Meeting people can be rough, can’t it? Introducing yourself. Deciding whether you should offer a handshake or a hug. If it’s a hug, should it be a side hug? Or full frontal? Or maybe just a fist bump? Immediately realizing the fist bump was a terrible choice. Forgetting the other person’s name the instant after they’ve said it. Trying to make intelligent conversation while wondering if your face looks weird. Wondering if you are smiling enough. Or smiling too much? And what should you do with your arms? Just let them, what, dangle there? The whole process is fraught with danger.
Yes, meeting people and actually talking to them is inefficient and uncomfortable. But despite the social anxiety inherent in those moments, it’s worth it. Why? Because you can’t possibly know what’s going on under the surface until you ask. You won’t ever know if that person is suffering from debilitating loneliness or barely concealing the fact they’re on the brink of crisis until you pause, lean in, and ask the first question.
If you find yourself succumbing to a dull apathy—modernity’s trademark move—toward the soul standing in front of you, pause. Yes, pause, and consider, for a holy beat, that perhaps it’s no coincidence you’re standing where you’re standing, and that person is standing where they’re standing. A pause might suddenly inspire you with a question that leads to those deeper, more vulnerable waters. A pause might open a much-needed door; it might be the gateway for a wary, care-worn soul to know they are safe in your company.
Pausing, for some of us, makes us uncomfortable. A pause makes us feel inefficient. A pause can feel like a sucking, social vacuum which begs, screams, bellows to be filled because the milliseconds of conversational silence feel like pain. Some of us are on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s the action of initiating and leaning into the conversation that feels uncomfortable. Especially with strangers. Beginning a conversation with someone we don’t know? Excruciating. But let’s talk about that discomfort, shall we? Discomfort feels bad, so we try to avoid it at all costs. But does social discomfort actually hurt us? Nah. It doesn’t. I’m sorry to be the person to whip this particular Band-Aid off, but sometimes discomfort is required for growth. We can tell our skittish amygdalas to chill out. We can remind ourselves that even though it feels like we might die if we say hello to a stranger, we actually won’t.
Why all this talk of inefficiency and discomfort? Because we’re about to veer into some granular realities about welcoming other humans into your mess. To proceed down this path, you will sometimes be required to take many holy pauses and let the silence stretch a few beats longer than you’d prefer. Sometimes, you might be required to speak up, to be the first to ask a question. Regardless of which direction relationship-building takes you, you will be required, sometimes, to turn your back on efficiency and embrace some awkward, hard stuff.
What kind of awkward, hard stuff? We don’t have time for anything like that. We have jobs. We have spouses. We have kids. We are in bowling leagues. We own chinchillas. We bring donuts to work on Monday. We have people relying on us to show up. We’re just too busy to offer much else in the way of relational capital.
Right now, at this very moment, in the exact place you happen to be, you’re surrounded by real people. You live where you live. This is your superpower. You know the people you know. Some of us know many people. Some of us move in smaller circles. Expanding the breadth of your social circle isn’t what I’m getting at here, so introverts, take a breath. What I’m highlighting is the reality that all of us already exist in a specific social context.
Sometimes, the places seem boring, and the people are annoying. Even so, choose to belong to those people. Know their names and faces, their histories. Belong to that place. It is precisely when we belong to real people and real places that our fragmented souls are mended and our wounds of isolation are bound. As we engage with others, in all their humdrum, inefficient, awkwardness, the seeds of human flourishing take root.
Perhaps it would help you to spend a moment thinking about those circles you move in. If you’re the type of person who likes creative interaction with what you’re reading, grab a pencil and a sheet of paper. If you’re the type of person who finds instructions like this annoying, feel free to roll your eyes and skip down a few paragraphs.
Okay, got your paper and pencil? Draw a circle in the middle of the page, and write your name in it. This will be the hub of the wheel, so to speak. Now, elsewhere on the page, draw another circle, and label it with the location you spend the majority of your time. Connect this circle back to the first circle with a straight line. Continue drawing circles and connecting them back to the original circle, labeling them with each place you spend time in a day, week, month, or year. Get specific. Make a circle for your favorite coffee shop, your local library, the yoga class at the Y, the grocery store, your favorite roller rink, your bike route.
These places, these circles, are where God has placed you.
You might wish you were somewhere sexier. Maybe you’re desperately praying for God to lead you elsewhere, anywhere, other than where you are. That’s fine. Pray away. But right now, recognize he’s put you exactly where you are. Belong to that place. Be loyal to it. Treat the people you see in that place with curiosity and kindness because of all the other places you could both be on Earth, you are where you are.
As you drew your circles, did you notice some familiar faces springing to mind? The barista with the cool tattoo who makes your latte? The librarian who knows your taste in books better than you do? As those faces pop up, ask yourself, do I know that person’s name? If you’re anything like me, you probably feel it’s intrusive to ask people their names or to strike up a conversation. In those moments of social anxiety, remember this little humdinger of truth and take courage: deep within each of us (including that barista with cool tattoos), we all still carry around our inner middle schooler, complete with our braces, acne, and insecurities. And we are all of us just waiting, praying, to be asked to dance. Granted, we might not actually get on the dance floor. But it’s nice to be noticed.
Okay, so you’ve thought about your circles. You’ve visualized the faces. Now, identify the barriers. The barriers will be hard to spot. Why? Because they usually blend into the wallpaper of our lives. What are the things we place between us and other people that protect us from having to belong to those people? Our houses? Do we welcome people into our homes, or do we use our homes as fortresses of solitude? What about our privacy-fenced yards? Our cars? Do we opt for the automated check-out? Or return library books in the dropbox instead of at the front desk? Oh, here’s a good one: Do we pick up our phone hundreds of times a day? Do we reach for them at red lights, in waiting rooms, in line at the grocery store, and at the dinner table? Do we look at them while our children are sitting next to us, asking us questions, trying to get our attention? Yes, our screens are delightful, intoxicating little barriers, aren’t they?
Noticing the barriers is a nice place to start. You can’t begin to dismantle them until you know what they are. Go ahead, give it a good, long think.
Now, let's start tearing the barriers down. This step will look different for all of us, depending on our temperaments. Here’s a suggestion for your consideration: Go out of your way to run into people. Build in time for relational collisions. Daniel Coyle, in his book The Culture Code, defines collisions as “serendipitous personal encounters.” In the context of group cultures, these collisions are “the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion.”
Could you make small, intentional changes to increase the number of collisions with the people in your circles? Could you walk the same route in your neighborhood, increasing the chance that you’ll meet the neighbors who live along that route? Or go to the same coffee shop and force yourself to finally ask the barista’s name. Then, greet him by name the next time you see him. Or, if you forget his name, be honest about having the short-term memory of a goldfish. Laugh, and let that small act of vulnerability set the stage for more interactions in the future.
Sit on your front porch instead of the back porch. Wave hello when people walk past. Better yet, plant a garden in your front yard. Gardens are like catnip for neighbors. People will come out of the woodwork. They’ll volunteer advice, make fun of your weird sunhat, offer you plants and seeds from their own gardens, and share equipment with you. Use this momentum to start a neighborhood Borrowers Club where people can share resources with each other, be it rototillers, snow skis, or pickleball rackets.
If eating food is something you enjoy, host a Taco Tuesday and invite a couple of folks to join you. If others catch the vision, perhaps they’d even be willing to bring a dish to share or even help host the dinner. It doesn’t have to be a large gathering or especially elaborate. Get creative.
Go ahead and live that fascinating life you’re already living. Eat good food. Drink good wine. Take unnecessarily meandering walks. Tell cringy jokes. Light candles. Be quiet sometimes. Pour the coffee, brew the tea, and uncork the whiskey. That’s one of the beautiful parts of being made in the image of God; each of us possesses a unique approach and boundless creativity when it comes to figuring out ways to enjoy life. You’re already doing it in all its messy, chaotic glory.
Capon, again from The Third Peacock, underscores the fact that our messy lives and chaotic means are our most powerful, potent tools. He wrote, “The whole mixed bag of clever schemes, bright ideas, and gross stupidities is all we have. To be the body of the mystery is to be the body of something you cannot take in hand as such. Accordingly, you take in hand what you can and then relax and trust the mystery to work through you.”
Martin Luther agreed: “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.”
When you sense the stirring of that subtle cultural force enticing you, luring you, lulling you into leaning away from those who desperately need you to lean in, take note. Allow yourself, occasionally, to pause and to be inconvenienced for the sake of your neighbor. Within these holy collisions, consider the inefficiency and occasional discomfort as part of the high calling of our existence as salt and light. Within the colliding, beauty hides. It’s there as we greet someone when we’d rather remain silent. It’s in the struggle as we commit a name to memory. It’s in each conversation we choose to enter when we’d rather not be bothered.
These small, hospitable acts are hard. They are awkward. They take time. And let’s be real, we’ll mess it up sometimes. I don’t always love Joe perfectly. Sometimes, as you know, I don’t love him very well at all. But relationships are a continual act of creation. Show me any creative endeavor that can be mastered without struggle. Creation is a cyclical path, encompassing both ebb and flow, failures and successes. Embrace the slower path, then. Lean in, friend, and put your elbows on the table. It’s within those meandering, messy moments of life together that we experience true flourishing.
For your further reading and listening pleasure:
David Foster Wallace: This is Water
Charles Taylor: A Secular Age
Andrew Fellows’ lecture: Community As a Subversion of Modernity
Robert Farrar Capon: The Third Peacock: The Problem of God and Evil
Daniel Coyle: The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
If you were born after 2000, this is for you: The sound of dial-up internet. (Yes, we used to have to listen to that whole thing every time we wanted to check our email.)
Need some conversational ideas or inspiration? I can’t promise you either of those things, but I give it a go in these articles: Is Zeus Dead Yet?: A Guide to Having Better Conversations and Let’s Get Coffee: Navigating the Angst of Existential Loneliness.
An Alabama native, Kate was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance.
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