Dear Readers,
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I’ve been seeing all of your complaints for a little while now. About parking, it getting to busy on the coast and traffic generally being horrible.
To be honest, I think a lot of it stems from the fact that we don’t know all of the faces around town anymore.
We’re afraid of change and we’re afraid of ‘the others’ that come with that. But what if we all knew each other?
What if we started to make an effort to get to know a new person each day. Not just a token hello or a nod. Not even a ‘hello, how are you?’.
I’m talking real conversations about real things.
I challenge you to ask someone you’ve never met before one of the following questions this week: What are you passionate about? What has been the happiest day of your life so far? Can you tell me about the first time you ever fell in love?
We might find it’s harder to complain about people we’ve shared a laugh or a tear with, especially when it comes to petty things like traffic and parking.
Who knows, we might even start being polite to each other again.
Yours in Friendship
R.D. Jones, Kiama
- Letter received April 26, 2018