7 Caring for One Another
A society can function well only if those within are concerned,
not only with their own needs or the needs of those
who immediately surround them, but by the needs of all,
that is to say, by the common good and the family of nations.
—JEAN VANIER, FOUNDER OF L’ARCHE
WHEN MARLENE AND I were first married, we lived for five years on the ninth floor of a relatively new apartment building in Waterloo, Ontario. I am having trouble remembering even one significant conversation with a neighbor in that building. I do not recall ever having a meal with anyone.
We came and we went. There was little or no connection between us and the others who lived there. There was no green space near us, no common room within which to gather, no building association—and, even though many children lived in the building, no playground for them to enjoy. If there had been a fire at night and we were huddled outside in the dark and someone asked me, “Are the people on your floor here?” I am not sure I could have identified them.
This is a terribly sad story. Instead of benefiting from what might have been an important community-building experience, I had no sense of ownership or belonging in this community. No one there cared for me, and I did not care for them. What shocks me most, as I have listened to the thoughts and stories of many, many people, is the fact that this is not an uncommon story.
Neighbors, Proximity, and Connection
Neighbors matter, community proximity matters, connection matters. In these chaotic times, “place” matters more and more, and knowing those who live around us is increasingly important. If we see people every day, we have a far greater opportunity for community than if we simply share common interests with people spread out over the miles. When it is easy to interact with one another and enjoy one another’s company, community becomes tangible and practical. We can learn from one another, observe one another, care and be cared for, and create safe places together for ourselves and our children.
Marlene and I came to this awareness partly through a vastly different experience of neighbors shortly after this, and then through the near loss of neighborliness again.
After five years of living in that apartment building, we moved a thirty-minute drive away to Pheasant Avenue in Cambridge, Ontario. The head office of the organization for which I was the executive director was located in this city, and Marlene had just entered a PhD program in Toronto. The move allowed me to be closer to my work and Marlene to her school.
We bought a real fixer-upper. We decided we would do some basic renovations for a month to get the house ready for us to move in. On our first night as homeowners, as we were stripping wallpaper from one of the bedrooms, Peter and Gary, the neighbors living in front of and next door to us, dropped in—“just to say hello, since we were out walking our dogs anyway,” as Peter said. It was a simple start, but it provided the opening for us to say hello whenever we saw one another.
No one really knows why we make some connections and others not. Marlene and I had very little in common with our neighbors on Pheasant Avenue. Our interests were different, our extended communities and our careers did not overlap, and they all had dogs—we did not. The one thing we did have in common was children, and we ended up rearing them together. Because our children played together, we had many reasons to communicate. Children can indeed bond neighbors, yet I know many children-intensive neighborhoods that lack the bond of togetherness. So why did we Pheasant Avenue folk all become lifelong friends?
Proximity was a big advantage. It was easy to go on walks together, or help one another paint a deck or mow a lawn or dig a garden. We had fun together: Friday-night gin and tonics all summer long in the Staps’ gazebo; swimming over at Dave and Marilyn’s; Victoria Day street fireworks, garage sales, and all sorts of events during which we closed down the entire street; progressive New Year’s Eve parties, with the appetizers at one house, dinner at another, and dessert and drinks at still others.
We also learned to take care of one another. We listened to work-life woes and celebrated victories. We had many birthday parties for the kids. Every year, our sons celebrated their birthday three times: a party with their friends, one with extended family, and one with the neighbors. We often looked after one another’s children after school or on weekends, which frequently ended with impromptu meals together. When our younger son, Michael, was born with colic and cried for three months straight, neighbors out for their evening walks dropped in, took Michael out of our arms to hold and cuddle him, and sent us on our way, saying, “I think you need a walk more than we do.”
We often joked that none of us had a life, meaning we had nothing better to do than hang out with one another, but, in fact, that was our life, and it was a good one. We made time for one another. We knew we had created something special together—we still know that. Marlene and I and our boys felt that we mattered to these neighbors; we were cared for, and we returned the caring.
Neighborliness Lost and Found
After completing her PhD program, Marlene accepted a job as a professor at the University of Waterloo and quickly was given tenure. Her normally half-hour commute from Cambridge to the campus took an hour because of traffic jams during rush hour, which kept getting worse. Michael was in the first grade, and Lucas was just entering the sixth. With me on the road so much as I started the Tamarack Institute, we considered a move back to Waterloo, to be closer not only to Marlene’s job but also to our sons’ schools.
We struggled with this decision for a long time. We knew it made sense to be closer to the children’s schools in case something happened when we were at work. Marlene’s mother lived in Waterloo and was available to help out when needed. We also knew that as she aged, she would need us more. Finally, the tough decision was made: we would buy a house near the university, leaving the neighbors who had become like family to us.
But where to move? We thought that if we could find a short street like the one we lived on in Cambridge, we would have a better chance of getting to know our neighbors and re-creating the sorts of connections we had there. We bought another fixer-upper at the end of a street with eight houses on it, and this time we allowed two months for renovations before moving in. Not one person came over to say hello during that time. We wondered if anyone else lived on the street.
School started for the children, and still no connections were made. By October, I was getting desperate. Our old neighbors, as they came to be known, had already come all the way to Waterloo to throw us a housewarming party, and yet we still had not met even one of our new neighbors. The children, feeling displaced, started making up stories about some of the neighbors and their houses, trying to scare one another about what took place in them. They were both upset that we had moved; this was their way to annoy us.
Several of our neighbors were Muslim, and I was deeply concerned that our sons would stereotype them because of their dress and other cultural differences. The bottom line was that I did not want my children to fear their neighbors. I wanted them to know their neighbors and, if not like them, at least respect them.
I remember a conversation Marlene and I had then, wondering if we had made a big mistake. We had known before we moved that it was going to be hard giving up the old neighbors. However, we had assumed that we would be connected to our new neighborhood in no time. How hard could it be to get to know your neighbors?
When only two children showed up at our front door for Halloween, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I’m not sure if it was the sugar high I was experiencing from eating all the candy we didn’t give out or if it was just sheer determination, but over the next week I went door-to-door to everyone on our street and invited them to our place for a wine-and-cheese party. This was an exercise in intentional neighborliness. I was committed to finding a time when everyone could be part of it. It took me four or five rounds—telling people, “Well, Bob cannot make it that day,” or “Klaus is away that weekend,” or “Mary is visiting family”—until I finally got a day when everyone was available.
The day of the party arrived, and so did the people. We greeted them, and our children carried cheese and desserts to them. It seemed a bit odd that people were friendly but shy—as though they were seeing one another for the first time. Nearly an hour passed, and the only person still not there was Shirley, who, according to her husband, Bob, was working late.
Not long after, the doorbell rang, and I greeted Shirley. As I was hanging up her coat, she turned to Klaus, who was sitting by the door, extended her hand, and said, “Hi, my name is Shirley.” My mouth dropped open. Such a greeting is reserved for strangers, but I knew from my walking back and forth between houses for this party that Shirley had lived on this street for fourteen years and Klaus for twelve. They lived only three houses away from each other.
That day I knew that if I was going to get to know my neighbors, it would be a long journey and require hard work. Luckily, I was a community developer by profession, but this was going to take every skill I had.
Over the next five years, things got better. Even though I had my own full-time work, traveling every other week, I organized spring and fall gatherings every year, always planning them around the dates for Ramadan to ensure that our Muslim neighbors would be able to come. I learned who had country cottages and when they were away to them. I tried to keep up with what was happening in my neighbors’ lives, especially those who traveled, so that whenever I planned a get-together, I could work around their schedules, too.
In the fifth year, when Ramadan fell very late in the fall and I had several trips for work, I had to postpone the fall party to early December. Given the cold, we had to have the party in our house rather than on the street. Everyone came—even Klaus, who was undergoing chemotherapy the next day. We had a wonderful time. Marlene commented as we were cleaning up that she had wondered if our neighbors were ever going home; the party went until after eleven, with everyone staying to the end.
Later that night, the first massive snowstorm of the season hit. When I awoke in the morning, our street was snowed in, with the end of our road blocked by a pile left from the snowplow. It usually took a day or two for a smaller plow to come and open the street back up. By ten, the two Bobs who live on our street were out with their snowblowers. Soon the rest of the neighbors joined in, some with shovels, others sending goodwill to those who toiled, all of us laughing and enjoying one another and the first snow. Klaus had a chemo treatment to get to, and we were determined to get him there. In no time the street was cleared. There was pure joy in knowing one another and working together.
That evening I received this e-mail:
To Glenburn Avenue neighbors
From Vy Dyck
Subject: YOU GUYS ARE WONDERFUL
As I peered from a bedroom window I witnessed two snowmen plowing as they mutually walked up and down the road passing each other. I thought I was dreaming but when I went outside our road was clear. NOW THAT IS TEAMMANSHIP AND THE TRUE SENSE OF GIVING. WOW you guys are GREAT.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF YOU
P.S. I was out walking with some friends last night and they were both jealous that we had a neighborhood that not only knew who each other was but did things for each other and had get-togethers with each other. They just couldn’t believe that two men from the neighborhood actually took the time to plow the entire street. :^)
Marlene and I had not created another Pheasant Avenue, but we had come closer to that reality. Now that the process has started, only good can come from it. Bob often helps clear our driveway of snow, and the other Bob is always helping Zlada with hers. Ali brings us organic eggs, and we have worked with him and Soheli to convert our broken-down basketball court into a beautiful community play area for the children on the street. Marlene, our sons, and I have converted a messy green space at the end of our street into a much prettier garden for all to enjoy.
A developer recently bought up a corner lot and wanted to significantly intensify it without neighborhood input. Because we had built trust on our street, we were able to make our collective voice heard. We overturned his plans. As I write this, we are planning a gathering for this weekend—again with 100 percent attendance expected.
The Importance of Knowing Our Neighbors
In chaotic times, knowing our neighbors is not optional. More than ever, we will want to trust our neighbors and rely on them for help, comfort, and safety.
What does it mean to be a neighbor or to live in a neighborhood? The simple act of knowing your neighbor is substantial today, but getting to know our neighbors is not really that hard, and the benefits are numerous:
• We feel safer and, more important, our children feel safer, mainly because we know something about our neighbors and their values and needs. They become real people rather than “those people.”
• We can help one another. Getting Klaus to chemo was important. Knowing that if we ever needed to get to chemo, our neighbors would do the same for us—priceless.
• Doing things with our neighbors is fun! Spontaneous get-togethers, or just stopping in to visit and catch up, gives us instant access to human connection.
• We build social capital, whereby knowing one another turns into a reciprocal relationship of caring. When many people have this bond, a community creates an informal social safety net by which people look out for one another.
So many things can keep us from getting to know our neighbors:
• The way we build our houses means that most people retreat to their backyards when they are outside, instead of gardening at the front of their houses, where they can meet the people on their street, or sitting on the porch and seeing them as they stroll by. I know of a New York City resident who, by city law, is not allowed to garden in his front yard, and he sees the struggle between southern, front-yard cultures where neighbors meet and share gardening lore and techniques and northern, backyard cultures that keep their gardens to themselves. Better (or worse) yet for those in backyard cultures, automatic garage door openers allow neighbors to drive into their homes and not emerge in public again until, with a clanking and a whir, the door opens the next morning and they roar off to another place. In cases like these, what are the chances of even noticing people coming and going?
• Life is just so busy. When we work away from home, we often leave early and come home late. Children go to school and then have a myriad of sports activities or lessons that take their time.
• We watch a lot of TV and surf the Internet, so we go “out” a lot less, creating fewer chances to see our neighbors.
• Many of our neighborhoods have sidewalks and bike paths that make us less reliant on cars, yet most of these walkways lead us out of the neighborhood. Neighborhoods that are purely residential lack restaurants or stores or yoga studios where we can bump into our neighbors.
• We have many different interests and come from many walks of life, causing us to assume that we have little in common. In reality, it is our differences that make us interesting.
• We belong to fewer churches, clubs, and recreational groups; therefore, even if we still meet many people, we do not do things together with them on a regular basis.
• As family members live farther away from one another, we have come to rely on professional systems of care rather than on one another to help us in times of need.
How to Get to Know Your Neighbors
There are some very concrete ways by which you can strengthen neighborliness.
• Take the initiative. If everyone waits for someone else to organize a gathering, no one will.
• Take a risk. Trust me, 80 percent of your neighbors want to know one another; all it takes is to organize an event well (see the next point), and most will come.
• Rather than just giving out a date and time and expecting people to show up, check in with them to see when might be good for them to gather (we call this “community engagement”). Take the time to entertain on dates that everyone, or at least a core group, can commit to. Not only is this efficient, in that it maximizes attendance, but also it sends the message that everyone is important and welcome. At first, you may need to go door-to-door. Embrace this, because it will help you meet people face-to-face, which is the very best organizing approach. Once you get going, you can gather everyone’s e-mail and other contact information to make things much easier.
• Consider changing your front yard. We took out our entire lawn and moved our garden to the front. We also removed the railing around the porch so that we can sit and enjoy the fullness of our flowers, shrubs, fruits, and vegetables—and greet the neighbors as they pass by.
• Get out and play. Children can bring a neighborhood together, and dogs are also great at building relationships. Stop and talk while you walk.
• Consider forming a neighborhood or apartment association. This can facilitate the organization of community events, socials, and programs that will support neighborhood cohesiveness.
In this chapter, I have stressed the value and ease (though it can take work at first) of being an intentional neighbor. All other forms of community building are more difficult, and in many ways less valuable, than knowing your neighbors. By the same token, knowing your neighbors facilitates all other community-building efforts.
Social Capital
Enjoying one another, explored in the previous chapter, is deeply connected to taking care of one another. This may be seen in the work of Robert Putnam, a sociologist from Harvard University. Putnam has written extensively about the value of social interaction, which he has named social capital: the investment that individuals make in their communities by belonging to social clubs or civic organizations.
In researching the quality of public services in Italy, Putnam stumbled across a finding that communities with the strongest social interaction through clubs, music groups, cooperatives, unions, and the like also had the most social harmony. When he looked at communities in the United States and Canada, he discovered a correlation between the decline in clubs and civic organizations and a decline in the quality of life. He advocated that just as communities rely on financial capital (the money that makes things happen), to be successful they also need social capital.
Putnam’s research has opened many people’s eyes to the importance of knowing others and doing things together consistently over time—in other words, enjoying one another (as discussed in more detail in the previous chapter) and building a bond of trust as a form of organizing. This, many have come to believe, creates networks of people who learn to work together and care for one another. In his best-known book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, he tells the story of a man who bowled for many years in the same league with the same people. This relationship led to identifying a donor for a kidney that this man needed to live. Their only connection was the reciprocity they had earned over fifteen years at the bowling alley.
KATHY’S STORY A Quiet Force for Good
Anita Fiegueth, a friend and part-time researcher at the Tamarack Institute for several years, shared Kathy’s story with me—a dramatic example of community caring.
Anita said that when she was a teenager, her mother visited Kathy, who had multiple sclerosis and was living in a hospital. Anita’s mother and Kathy had both studied nursing at the same hospital in Winnipeg. Both were married and had a son and daughter around the same age. But Anita’s mother could play soccer with her kids, while Kathy was unable to move anything except her head.
One of Kathy’s frustrations about needing to live in the hospital was never getting to eat her supper while it was hot, since patients had to wait for the nurses on the ward to feed them. So Anita and her mother visited every Tuesday afternoon to give Kathy her supper.
Kathy was a quiet force and a powerful example of how to live with dignity in the face of adversity. She was a good listener and a thoughtful speaker. Many people came to her to ask her advice about navigating the complexities of the hospital bureaucracy. Over the years, she had many roommates, and some of their family and friends continued to visit her even after their loved one had died or been moved to a nursing home.
One day Kathy announced that she was going to start mouth painting. With the help of an artist, she (with no artistic background) slowly started painting. Her idea was to make a painting that could be used on a Christmas card and sold as a fundraiser for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Every year, Kathy painted a card. Her work fueled one of the society’s most successful fundraising efforts.
Years later, Anita brought her own children to visit Kathy. Soon after, Kathy contracted pneumonia and decided to decline medical treatment. She had lived with MS for more than forty years and was ready to stop struggling. She had already beaten the odds: she had seen her children grow and marry, had four wonderful grandchildren, was a successful painter, and had helped innumerable people when their lives intersected with hers in the hospital.
The church was packed for Kathy’s funeral, which was an inspiring tribute to a person who, with all her difficulties and physical limitations, had touched many people and created a community out of her adversity. Some might say “how sad” when they hear about Kathy’s illness, but her suffering connected her to many people and brought both them and her great joy.
Caring for one another has a way of doing that.
JOSHUA’S STORY Letting Neighborliness Take Its Course
Joshua was born without a functioning brain. For his parents, the moment of receiving this devastating news about their first child was almost more than they could bear. The doctors gave them a choice: keep their son on a version of life support for his entire life or “let nature take its course.”
Joshua’s parents brought their anguish and dilemma to their church, whose members formed a deep circle of support around this young couple. They met weekly to sit in silence and pray. Every day a meal was dropped off at the home and a doctor in the congregation visited.
When Joshua died a month later, more than three hundred people came to his funeral. Stories of life and death were shared and many tears were shed in a collective grieving of a life that had lasted only a month. Many said that it was the most meaningful funeral they had ever attended, a moment of shared humanity and vulnerability.
Joshua had orchestrated a symphony of caring and changed a community forever.
MILDRED’S STORY Enriching Relationships
Mildred is a developmentally challenged adult who lives a life of joy in a L’Arche community. L’Arche was founded in 1964 by Jean Vanier, son of Canadian Governor General Georges Vanier and Pauline Vanier, when he opened his home to two men with disabilities in the French town of Trosly-Breuil. L’Arche has grown into an international organization operating on every continent in forty countries.
At L’Arche, Mildred is part of a small, faith-based community of friendship between people who have disabilities and their care-givers, often young people with a goal of developing a lifelong support system. They highlight the unique capacity of persons with disabilities like Mildred to enrich relationships and to build a community where the values of compassion, inclusion, and diversity are embraced and lived by each person.
Mildred feels acceptance and joy living in community with caregivers who have committed to living in community with her. She experiences and contributes to the fullness of community and lives a life of purpose.
Survival of the Kindest
The stories of Kathy, Joshua, and Mildred highlight the conclusion of University of California psychology professor Dacher Keltner in Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, that “the emotions that promote the meaningful life are organized according to an interest in the welfare of others. Compassion shifts the mind in ways that increase the likelihood of taking pleasure in the improved welfare of others.” In other words, we are hardwired to care for one another. Keltner goes on to discuss this as a mutual sort of relationship. We instinctively know that if we benefit the lives of others, they, in turn, will benefit our lives. Working for the good of all increases the benefit for each of us.
Charles Darwin is known for his “survival of the fittest” theory. The common description is that the most able animals will continue to evolve, while weaker species will be eliminated over time. This interpretation often has been used to justify what some call a “dog eat dog” world. The biggest dog, the most aggressive dog, will always get what it wants, and the others will get what is left over. This has so deeply entered the ethos of our culture that we have adopted competition as the core value by which we live and the GDP as the chief measure of our success.
What is most often overlooked is Darwin’s work in his later years, as he observed not only competition but also cooperation in animals. As Jeremy Rifkin observes in his book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, “Darwin came to believe that survival of the fittest is as much about cooperation, symbiosis, and reciprocity as it is about individual competition and that the most fit are just as likely to enter in cooperative bonds with their fellows.” Taking care of one another and looking out for one another has been an evolutionary prerequisite. It is why we have survived.
We are naturally an empathic people, says Rifkin, a world-renowned economist and writer. We naturally care. As young as two years of age, children actively try to alleviate the suffering of a crying child by bringing over a toy, giving a hug, or taking that child to his or her mother. Empathy, according to Rifkin, is the act of entering into the emotional state of someone else’s suffering and absorbing it as if it were one’s own pain.
“We are not just a species whose fundamental reason for being is survival,” writes Rifkin. “We are by nature an affectionate species that continuously seeks to broaden and deepen our relationship and connections to others, in effect to transcend ourselves by participating in more expansive communities of meaning.” As a result, “our increasingly complex social structures provide the vehicles for the journey.” Yes! Community is our natural way of being, and caring is at the center of community.
When we believe that we need to be the fastest, the smartest, and the best, we create walls around ourselves that separate us from others. When we believe that by cooperating, caring, and reaching out to others, we will harness the wisdom within our diversity, we create the conditions for community. It is our choice how we want to live and what consequences will result.
A theory known as “survival of the kindest” is growing in popularity. It states that evolution is more a cooperative process than a competitive one. Species that have been able to collaborate and learn from one another are much more adaptable to their environments and able to respond to the changing circumstances in which they find themselves. Survival of the fittest was not just about being stronger, better, and faster. Individual animals did not survive, but species ultimately evolved. The more the members of a species worked together, learned from one another, and cared for one another, the more likely they were to survive.
Caring for one another and working together are at the heart of community. It is how we build a sense of belonging. When we create an ethos of caring, kind individuals not only fare better but also are able to evoke kindness in others, thus prompting cooperative exchange.
In conclusion, while it is not a simple point-A-to-point-B process, place and proximity matter: community is built from the neighborhood out, from knowing your neighbor to sharing your life with your neighbor to caring for one another in your neighborhood to building social capital by forming associations, clubs, faith communities, and so on. In the previous chapter we looked at the power of joy in community; in this chapter we have looked at the power of neighborliness, caring, and empathy. Now it is time to see how all of this gathers momentum to help communities make a difference, together, for a better world.