I rise early each morning to walk the streets of My Mayberry. It's not an aimless walk by any means; more like a purposeful 5-mile power walk, accompanied by my loyal companion Otto, a high-spirited 80 lb. German Shorthair Pointer. Like me, Otto flat out loves to walk and meet people. I make it a point to extend a smile and a wave to every person that we encounter along the way.
During the past decade, I've come to more fully appreciate the importance of intentionally connecting with my local community on a daily basis. For me, it's both spiritually and physically renewing. My Mayberry is the place where I am reminded of what community is, and how dramatically it has changed during the past half century. Beyond the morning walks, my work draws me out beyond My Mayberry, to a variety of Northern New England towns, into the caring communities of others. At any one time, there are approximately 15 communities that I actively case manage; each formed in the interest of providing organized care for a loved one facing a life-threatening illness.
The word community has a different meaning for just about anyone you ask these days. Since community forms the cornerstone of not only this blog, but also of eHope, it's important to establish a baseline definition of community before pressing forward with quantifiable and experiential evidence of our increasing social isolation.
Community is the all-inclusive "we" - one which transcends socio-economic, political, ethnic or spiritual belief. It isn't necessarily determined by how many friends we have - that's affinity. While affinity groups form an essential segment of our overall community, the folks who lie outside the people groups that we personally belong to, represent an essential larger segment of our total community.
It's my contention that one of the largest declining people groups are neighbors / neighborhoods. Case in point: of the 2,300 people in our user base who have stepped forward to care for a friend or family member in one of eHope's 70 caregiving communities, less than 5% are from the immediate neighborhood of the person receiving care - the peeps who are perhaps best-suited to spontaneously provide non-medical physical, emotional and social support in a time of serious illness.
Technological innovation and its resulting impact on personal mobility during the past half century has drawn us away from the people in closest proximity to us, in our search for work, play, and spirituality. The time spent traveling to an array of increasingly far-flung people groups represents time not spent connecting with the people on our street. Not only is our own care compromised over the long haul, it's entirely likely that we are unaware of if or when our neighbors need our help.
When we do connect with the peeps in our hood, the primary motivator rests upon commonality in social status or core values. There is a word for this - homophily. It means quite basically, birds of a feather flock together. Many would say, "So what? What’s wrong with cultivating a homogenous network of like-minded (homophilic) friends? I barely have enough time to do even that."
The problem arises during a health crisis which compromises your mobility and your ability to travel to your preferred people groups (job, book club, church etc.). If there is sufficient relational depth within your people group(s), you can likely maintain a network of support over the short run, but if you are facing something much more serious like cancer which extends beyond 6 months, the peeps who came to mean the most begin to fall away, leaving you in a neighborhood surrounded by strangers. This is not at all a theoretical scenario. It's becoming the norm throughout America; something that I see each frequently in the caring communities we facilitate.
The opposite of homophily is heterophily, or the love of the different; the tendency of individuals to collect in diverse groups. In all honesty, I bring a strong heterophilic bias not only to this blog, but also to the eHope families that we serve, one which was formed during a 20-year army career, where everything was accomplished within the context of a squad. The squad was comprised of a diverse collection of people from different ethic, socio-economic, and religious backgrounds; all living in close proximity to one another. Within a heterophilic social network where the group is only as strong as its weakest link, and its members work constructively to strengthen that weakest link, there quite simply are no gaps in care, and social isolation is far less prevalent than that of the population at large.
This is not necessarily about hanging out and becoming best friends with everyone on your street. It's more like making an intentional effort to simply get to know each other's first names; to let each other know that you have their back during a time of need, matched with a heartfelt desire to rejoice in the birth of a child on your street.
Next week I'll share quantifiable data which sheds light on the degree of the increasing social isolation in America and how it ultimately impacts our mortality. In the meantime, I encourage you to pick a neighbor on your street - someone that you don't already know, and step outside your comfort zone. Don't go next door to try and fix them; simply meet them where they are at and get to know their first name. Forge a reciprocal relationship, where either of you would know if the other were in trouble and in need of help. It doesn't have to be a neighbor who thinks, looks, smells or spends like you do. It could be the neighbor with the worn out fan belt, who has rolled past your bedroom window at 4:30 AM for the past 2 years, flywheel squealing, on their way to work.
"We needn't think alike to love alike."
~ Frances David ~
