How Sweet It Is
January 31, 2019When it comes to connecting, the smallest of interactions can yield big results.
When it comes to connecting, the smallest of interactions can yield big results.
Successful authors say you become a writer by writing. And when it comes to community, you become a connector by connecting. The magic is in the daily doing. This week I’m trying two new tools to help me stick to my goal of reaching out every day.
The minute we flag our busyness in a social interaction, we send a signal to the person we’re talking with that we don’t have much time to be with them—that we have important things to do and places to be, and that we’d better make it quick. This subtle cue cuts off conversation, isolates us from others, and insulates us from connection.
As I’ve set out to enact my 2019 resolution to become “the sort of person who connects meaningfully every day” I’ve decided to follow the advice of the habit scientists.
I plan to improve myself in 2019 by focusing on other people. I hope to make 2019 not the year of me, but the year of YOU. The year of rebuilding community in a hyper-individualistic world.
Project Reconnect is about awakening—to my own unmet need to connect and belong, and to the vibrant but latent relationships and communities all around me that are waiting to be activated.
Together we can chart a path toward a relationalist revolution, which may go further than anything else we’ve tried for solving our nation’s most pressing problems.
Could the source of our national sickness and my own ongoing sense of incompleteness be one and the same? And could the solution be–if not simpler, then far more elemental–than we think?
I have begun to see that the hole in my soul that has recently been calling out for attention is in the shape of something I have thought more about than almost anyone, but, in reality, have less of than almost everyone.
Healing without sharing has been lonely. A good kind of lonely, maybe—the kind usually described with lovely-sounding words like “solitude” or “seclusion.” But lately it’s started to feel like my period of spiritual confinement might be coming to an end.
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