The "Je Ne Sais Quoi" of Neighborliness

(Source: Unsplash/Beth Macdonald.)

Nearly 10 years ago, I found myself boarding a bus heading from New York City to Providence, Rhode Island. I had just earned a journalism grant to write about economic development in four American cities and Providence was the first city on my list. Finding places to live and write from in 10-week stints within each city would be a huge part of the adventure, especially since I had decided to get rid of my car—not to mention, my writing had a concrete start date, which meant I needed to get to Providence despite not knowing where I would live.

Fortunately, Providence is a college town and I had managed to get in touch with a local pastor who knew several young people whom he thought might have spare rooms. We had been emailing for a few weeks, but it was only on the day I left New York that I started actually getting phone numbers to call. For the four-hour bus ride, I called and texted those numbers, my stomach churning as night fell and we got closer to the city. At one point, I curled up on my seat for a brief nap; having sent all the messages I could, I resorted to prayer.

About 20 minutes outside of the city, I finally got in touch with one of the young ladies on the list. Her name was Kara. I explained to her my project, my need for housing and my budget. Her response was simple and to the point: “Yes of course, come straight here when your bus arrives.”

That’s how I found myself standing outside an old house in the west side of Providence, greeting a young, 20-something, brown-haired, blue-eyed lady with a bright smile, who would quickly become one of my best friends. The taxi driver wrestled my bags out of the trunk and hauled them upstairs, where I met her two roommates and her Siamese cat named Paco.

Smiling curiously, they all (minus the cat) gathered around the stranger in their kitchen as I explained my unusual project and situation. They showed me a spare room currently used for storage that I could rent and when I mentioned I was hungry, they hastily piled in the car to shuttle me to Chipotle across town. That weekend was a blur of clearing out the room, running to Target for supplies, cleaning, and unpacking.

I couldn’t help but be a little nervous. Here I was, basically a stranger, crashing this home and this group of friends. Worried about being too invasive, I figured I’d play it safe: pay rent on time, stick to myself, do my chores, and do my writing.

All of that flew out of the window that Saturday night as I found myself getting my hand-stamped at a local bar with Kara and two of her guy friends: Nick (a missionary-kid-turned-artist who grew up partly in Europe, curled an epic mustache, and wore tweed basically year-round) and Vas (a Russian-speaking psychologist who played music in his spare time, constantly asked good questions, and had a pee-in-your-pants sense of humor).

We danced like our life depended on it at that silent disco, only stumbling back out into the city in the early hours of the morning when we were too sweaty and exhausted to dance anymore, grinning like fools. Just a few hours later, we’d rendezvous again at church and then promptly commandeer a large table at a local diner for brunch with even more young people, all of whom acted like it was the most normal thing in the world to include a random girl from NYC who liked cities and who had literally shown up on their porch in the middle of the night.

After years of moving frequently and never really having a primary friend group, I found myself amazed in the coming weeks by an unusual, unplanned, and completely authentic level of inclusion. Text messages poured through constantly with invites to various social events. There were long conversations into the night with Kara, more dance parties, and plenty of late-night spontaneous trips to a local Thai restaurant, Apsara, where we would share steaming (and cheap) plates of fried rice, noodles, and crab wontons.

I’ve met nice people, sure, but this wasn’t just people being nice. This was a level of inclusion and hospitality that I had never experienced before. In all of my life and in the 10 years since that providential bus ride, I haven’t experienced anything like it. It’s a series of memories that I think of often when I contemplate the kind of community I wish I had in the places I’ve lived since.

More than Friendliness

Part of building strong towns involves thinking about rebuilding the social fabric within our neighborhoods. With trust between neighbors and strangers at an all-time low, social media increasingly fragmenting our attention and sense of community, and the pressures of work and money claiming much of our leisure time, this is much easier said than done. But it’s worth thinking about and part of this project involves reclaiming a working vision of neighborliness.

At its core, being neighborly means taking time to invest in building loose ties with the people who live near us. Obviously, we’d all agree that this involves being friendly: waving here and there, stopping to chat, agreeing to collect mail when neighbors are out of town. But for those of us wanting to go beyond the occasional hello, it’s worth it to consider more extra-mile gestures of inclusion, like inviting neighbors over for meals, hosting block parties, or launching interest groups. Not only should we think about going the extra mile, but we should also contemplate why they have the potential to impact people’s lives so much.

For years, when I’ve experienced unexpected and generous hospitality from strangers, I’ve felt there was a “je ne sais quoi” quality about it. It was only recently, while in conversation with Scott Jones for an upcoming episode of The Bottom Up Revolution podcast, that I found myself able to shape this feeling into more specific ideas. Scott runs We Love Long Beach, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering genuine connection among neighbors in his hometown. They do this through block parties, four year-round social initiatives, and neighborhood groups.

The organization got started when Scott and his sister started throwing neighborhood pancake breakfasts, at one point attracting crowds of up to 500. I’ve never done anything to this scale, but I do remember hosting a BBQ last summer with a neighbor and feeling goosebumps as dozens of people trickled in through the side gate, their smiles contagious, ready to share food and linger with neighbors they perhaps had never met. In our conversation, Scott and I wrestled with the question of why reaching out to strangers is so uniquely potent. What is the je ne sais quoi that gives these moments their electric charge?

Unmerited Inclusion

I think the answer has something to do with duty. The relationships we build with friends and family function partly based on a sense of obligation: we are expected to show up in particular ways for our friends and family and many of these duties we intuit automatically. But with strangers, the lines of duty and obligation aren’t so clear. Besides courtesy and respect, what do we owe our literal neighbors?

Honestly, probably not much and this is exactly what gives neighborliness its magic. Strangers, technically, don’t owe each other attention, inclusion, hospitality, or friendship. The neighbors who prefer to not say hello and just shuttle inside their homes are not wronging us in any way. It’s the neighbor who decides to say hello, to throw the block party, to toss out the spontaneous dinner invite that’s shaking things up in a radical way. In other words, it’s precisely because strangers owe us no attention that their attention feels like a special gift.

This is why Kara’s inclusion and the hospitality I’ve experienced from strangers during my years of travel, moving frequently, and adventuring around the world has stayed with me in such a powerful way. Looking back on these memories nearly a decade later, this season of friendship still ranks as one of the most magical experiences of my adult life. These radically hospitable characters in my story understood the power of unmerited inclusion. This is the je ne sais quoi of attentive neighborliness and it’s this kind of thinking that has the power to heal our communities.

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