blog.mikro2nd.net

Making Neighbourhood

A post on the socials about how the person's Dad helped make the neighbourhood by talking to everybody and anybody, at any opportunity. How he helped out where and when he could. And here's the point that chimes along with my own experience:

Neighbouring is work.

You have to work at it, and it's not always fun. It's an investment that might pay off sometime in the future, and a lot of people have been trained/convinced/brainwashed into thinking that that investment of time and energy is not worth the trouble because someone else — the municipality, the government, the UN, somebody — will come along to bail you out when the shit hits the fan, when in actuality it's your neighbours you're going to have to rely on (and who are going to need to rely on you), and if a time of crisis is the first time you're meeting your neighbours, then that's so much less likely to go well.