Last week, while I was working in our apartment, I started to hear these loud noises coming from the down stairs unit. At first I heard the pounding of a hammer. Then it sounded like the cabinets in the kitchen were being ripped out of the walls.
I peaked out the window to find two maintenance vehicles parked outside. I shrugged my shoulders, and figured something went wrong with one of our neighbor’s appliances. Then, I went back to work.
The next morning, I got a text from Tony:
“Did you know our neighbors downstairs moved out?”
I told him I didn’t. That I’d noticed they were loading up some of their stuff from their garage a few days before, but I hadn’t thought much of it. He then went on to text that he saw a new lock on the door on his way out that morning. Also, he mentioned, some old parts of their deck had been ripped out, which explained the noises I heard.
But one of my first thoughts was—I never got to know them. They lived below us for at least five or six years, and I never knocked on their door to introduce myself. Other than smiling when meeting each other in passing, we never had a conversation.
Yes, I knocked on their door once to tell them the headlights were left on in their car. I made sure their young son got his toy airplane back when it somehow found it’s way onto our porch. Only honestly—I mostly felt frustrated with them.
For a while, they worked on their cars in their garage below our apartment and the fumes would fill our kitchen and the office where I work. Not wanting to be confrontational, I never said anything to them or the main office of the complex. Until, the carbon monoxide detector in our apartment went off repeatedly calling for multiple visits from maintenance. They asked if I thought the source could be from anything other than our stove. So I told them about the auto work being done down below.
When the auto body business ceased, that is when parking became a real issue. Sometimes they’d have three and four cars parked where the cars of the people in the upstairs units (us), should be able to park. Little did we know (until multiple conversations with our apartment complex), that it wasn’t all our downstairs neighbors’ fault. There just wasn’t enough parking in our area for all of those living around us.
“If I’d only gotten to know them. If we had a relationship, I could talk to them about this.”
Often, during these frustrating—yet definitely first world problem—times, a thought would enter my brain. One I had over and over, only I never did anything about it. A thought that could have made things better. I’d think, “If I’d only gotten to know them. If we had a relationship, I could talk to them about this.”
Now, the cynic in me, as well as a few not so shining moments on our neighbors’ part, would say they wouldn’t have been nice anyway. After all, they didn’t make an effort to get to know us either. And even if we had tried, we wouldn’t have had a relationship.
The truth is, I’ll never know.
Only a little voice inside keeps telling me that this is one of the foundational cracks of the division in our country. Because we didn’t take the time to get to know our neighbors—and we’re not the only ones not doing this—there was estrangement. And where there’s no relationship, there’s no reason to care for each other.
Where there’s no relationship, there’s no reason to care for each other.
A separation that disables us from talking to our neighbors about simple things like parking, keeps us from being able to talk about the serious things happening in our communities or our country. At least, to talk about them in a civilized and loving way. However, this is not the only thing that is being lost.
We live in a time where almost fifty percent of adults in our country feel alone. Yet how many of us literally live walls apart from our neighbors, like we do? What would happen if we got over our fears and talked to each other? Really tried to get to know one another?
As I said in the title of this post, I am not a good neighbor. I don’t have the answers for what this looks like. But I am going to try to be better with the people who move in next.
Who are your neighbors?
When was the last time you talked to them?
Last month, many of us filled out my Start Here: Dream Planner, to help us plan our 2020, set goals to work toward our dreams, and to see how our lives are aligning with our values. But we also looked at how we want our relationships to be better this year. If you want to live more intentionally in 2020–Sign up here, for my free Start Here: Dream Planner to help you do all these things and more!
Photo by Christian Stahl on Unsplash
