Know Your Neighbour (Canadian spelling intended)

Three times during the 12 week Resolutionary Challenge I participated in earlier this past winter, the wildcard point was earned by doing something called

Know Your Neighbor.

which is as founder Whitney Johnson describes "a community outreach initiative".

As I read the implementation guide I sensed that embracing these concepts and striving to do them would have a significant impact on the Resolutionary Challengers' lives. I wasn't wrong.



The challenge to invite and extend outside the established social circles was "outside the comfort zone". While a few naturally were inclined this way, most found themselves being stretched in an unprecedented way and needed the competition of earning a point to help them push beyond their typical social relationships.

Changing behaviors requires increasing awareness which the guide and resources found at the Know Your Neighbor do exceptionally well. With a heightened consciousness and goal to reach out, participants began to look outside their home and into their neighborhoods. They invited neighbors to participate in fund raising for Haiti, to attend events they were already going to, to have dessert in their home. One lady took the opportunity to visit with her neighbors as she introduced her new baby. One felt prompted to call an old friend. She says " It was last minute and I usually don't do things like that because I'm always a little worried it will inconvenience
people, but you know what? It was great. It was really good to
reconnect, and I think she was glad for the break in her routine too.
It was a tiny thing, really, but I'm so glad I did it."

A tiny thing, but something that warmed her heart, that warmed her friend's heart. And who can tell the effect that radiant heat had on others that day and soon thereafter?



Of the experience, another participant wrote, "It wasn't always my physical neighbors - although that did happen. I reached out wherever I happened to be that week, at church, at my children's activities, at my children's school, in my neighborhood and in my community. It didn't take all that much extra effort. It was getting over my "yikes! what if they don't like me?" insecurities and taking the first step. The warmth and the sense of community increased wherever I happened to be that week and it has taken on its own momentum."

To really make lasting changes to embrace and implement fully Know Your Neighbor, it would seem important to have constant reminders. Like taking your vitamins or getting daily exercise. What would happen if each morning we arose with the thought and desire to reach out - to tear down those obstacles and veils and filters that keep us invisible from one another?

I close this blog with a poem I studied in elementary school too many years ago to name. I have never forgotten it and hope that I will commit it to action the remainder of my life.

MENDING WALL by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say '.Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."