Defined by the promises we keep
November 29, 2018 | Raleigh News & Observer
The morning after Thanksgiving, I put on my hiking boots a little before dawn and headed west.
After full days of work and family, the quiet hours alone on the icy trails of Grandfather Mountain felt luxurious. The cold and the solitude felt freeing and healthy. The shiver of loneliness when I wandered back to the truck in fading daylight was welcome, a reminder of the people and the obligations waiting for me back home.
“Who we are is what we commit to,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said this week in Asheville, speaking to civic leaders and politicians at the ReCONNECT NC Forum. “Life is defined by the promises we make to other people and how we fulfill them.”
Brooks was in North Carolina to kick off a daylong discussion about strengthening community ties and reversing the rise of isolation and despair in American life. ReCONNECT NC, led by NC State’s Institute for Emerging Issues, will spend the next three years bringing together people from all over the state to tackle one of the deepest cultural challenges of our time: disconnection.
The last few decades have seen alarming declines in social trust, civic participation, and self-reported feelings of connection and friendship. Too many of us are wandering alone not as a temporary escape, but as a way of life. It shows up in rising rates of suicide and drug overdose, declining trust in institutions, and hours upon hours of deadening screen time.
“We feel it, we sense it, and we don’t like it,” said Jack Cecil, president of Biltmore Farms and a leader in the ReCONNECT effort. “This has really been hurting us as a community, as a state.”
It’s also pushing people to try some creative approaches to community building. At the Asheville forum, Rev. Nicole Jones of Morningstar United Methodist Church in Canton talked about joint service projects with other denominations. “We have a ministry of connection,” she said.
Allen Johnson, the editorial page editor of the Greensboro News & Record, has invited some of the paper’s most vitriolic online commenters to meet at a local bar. “There’s value in having those face-to-face discussions,” he said, noting that people behave a lot better in person than they do behind a screen. “When you get to know people’s stories, you can actually have conversations with them.”
Environmental activist and Asheville City Councilor Julie Mayfield described what happened when she started meeting face-to-face with Duke Energy District Manager Jason Walls. Instead of fighting one another from a distance, they were able to forge a compromise that reduced Duke’s environmental footprint and kept the lights on. “We had to get permission from our lawyers to sit down and talk to one another,” Mayfield said. “But that’s the only way we could learn to trust each other.”
Throughout the day, people talked about the joyful obligation — the choice to give up some personal freedom in devotion to a church, a neighborhood, a school, a town. Building relationships inevitably means giving up some autonomy, opening ourselves up to discomfort and sacrifice.
Steve Willis, a minister in Bedford, Va., and a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, described that balance in a lovely essay for The Daily Yonder. “Contentment is the fruit of long family commitments, meaningful and productive work, and deep and abiding attachments to community,” he wrote. “The creative putting together of these elements over time brings genuine satisfaction to a person and puts into perspective the ordinary, daily tasks that sometimes drive us crazy.”
A lot of my daily tasks drive me crazy, and a long list of commitments means that my Grandfather Mountain days will be few and far between.
That’s a fair trade for the rich connections that make a contented life, the kind of connections we can all build for a stronger state.
Community columnist Eric Johnson lives in Chapel Hill. Originally published on the op-ed page of the News & Observer.