It’s What You Make Of It

One of the best parts of this trip, I’m quickly learning, is the opportunity to gain quiet little snapshots into people’s lives. Over the past ten weeks, I have become privy to a multitude of the highlights and lowlights of people’s days; I am continually inspired and humbled by the stories they tell.

And beyond that — I am delighted. Delighted by how people open their hearts and stories up to me, swapping stories across bar stools, sitting with a recorder between us, or on the patio as we try to capture WiFi before falling asleep in separate tents at night.

When I set out on this trip, I had my own notions of what small towns and cities along the way would be like. I had a long list of fantasies, in the form of a bucket list, filling pages I wrote many months ago, expectations for how small town people versus big city people would act and the experiences I would have along the way. And like most things on this trip, the reality has flipped my fantasy on its head.

But perhaps that is content for another post.

Because one thing is the same, and one thing is exactly as I’d expected: community. It often looks different as you cross between urban and rural settings, places where I can upload a video in 5 minutes and others where I’m lucky to see two bars of service, but the heart of it is true. People who care, and look out, and stand up for one another. True “love your neighbor as thyself” at work.

• A group of LGBT+ folks in Indianapolis, who came together because of a spur-of-the-moment TV on Thursday tradition but grew into a welcoming “have we known each other for two days or two years?” group of friends old and new. They live together, share together, move together, and have created a family based in choice and compassion, instead of blood.
• The couple who open up their home in Madison every Thursday for a community meal, and invite anyone who’d like to join to join… and have been doing this for (literal) decades. Between 20 and 40 people show up on a typical week, and the party continues whether or not their actually present.
• A group of people who get together every Sunday evening to play Old Style music, which is the precursor to bluegrass, in a local bar. Anyone is welcome to join in and play, and it gathers quite a crowd.
• Two bartenders who turned shame on its head with something called “Bikini Thursdays,” where they wear (yes) bikinis to work as a metaphorical middle finger to the men who told one of them she was too fat to wear revealing clothes.

Moving from place to place every few days on this trip has shown me how community builds itself in many shapes in many places — and how necessary community and relationships are for our physical and mental health. If you go by the headlines, you would never believe that communities of mutual love and respect exist and cross all sorts of arbitrary lines that divide us.

But they do. And they inspire me daily.