CHAPTER 4

ROAMING IN YOUR PERSONAL VILLAGE

Roaming is as old as human experience. For three million years we evolved while living a hunter-gatherer life style. By the time our species-Homo sapiens came along, we had progressed to hunter-collectors because we roamed our countryside and collected useful items to take back to our little bands. We searched and roamed and collected over so many millions of years that countless numbers of circuits evolved in our brains to support our wanderings.

Even though we no longer call ourselves roaming hunter-collectors, we still are. If you want to see hunter-collector activity in action, go to the local mall, grocery store, beach, or hardware store. Scores of people are roaming and searching for treasures that they will take home. Some won't even use what they gather, they will simply collect and store what they find.

I remember asking my eccentric friend, Richard, why he saved 5,000 empty tuna fish cans. He replied, "I have no idea. I just could not bear to throw away so many of the same thing." As we talked, we were standing in the middle of his crowded basement, piled to the ceiling with the treasures he had collected from years of prowling in surplus stores. Treasures for which he had no use, but could not resist bringing home. His hunter-collector brain was still at work, though instead of roots and berries and a stone tool he collected lathes, old searchlights and tuna fish cans. You know people like that. Their cupboards are full of useful things that they may never use. In today's language, we call people who do this hoarders or pack rats or obsessive compulsives. But in fact, it is not so strange that all of us roam and search for treasures because we evolved genetically to do just that. And as we roam, search, hunt and collect we find the treasures that support our lives.

In our efforts to collect, we roam throughout our territory. Not only do we roam in our physical world, but we also roam in our people world. Your personal village contains everything you will ever need as you negotiate that grand journey from birth to death. So use your ancient brain to go searching in your community. It will serve you well. Roaming through the village of people around us is one of the great adventures of life.

Get personal and wander around

Our new gadgets provide us with an efficiency for connecting to others that is a great boon, but eventually we have to physically get up close and personal if we are to have any more than superficial contact.

Once while visiting my parents, I asked my mother where Dad was. "Oh, probably down the alley talking to the neighbors," was her reply. And indeed he was. I found him with a teenager under the hood of a car. Before long the car was lurching down the alley in a cloud of smoke, so I joined Dad as he continued his rounds until he discovered Lois on her back porch. Another half hour followed, chatting about arthritis, grandchildren and the weather. So it went, for two hours until we arrived back home for afternoon coffee.

Jake, a neighbor, was already there. He had stopped by to report on the auction up at Springdale. Mom had coffee and cake ready for the inevitable afternoon crowd. My sister and her children stopped by to see if they needed anything from the store. The Bomsteads dropped in. A little more coffee, lots of talk and soon it was time for dinner.

I was participating in the ever-swirling circles of family, friends and neighbors that were a daily part of my parents" lives. As I watched, I realized that, except for the family, this collection of people was in place because my father constantly reached out to meet new people and renew old contacts with anyone who was near. He made friends by simply wandering around and making small talk with everyone with whom he came into contact. After a lifetime of doing this, he had accumulated a personal village that was amazingly rich and diverse. You can do this too.

You can develop a habit of chatting about little things with people who populate your daily life. Ask the clerk in the store how the day is going. Talk with the kids down the block about their games. Speak with your neighbors about the traffic or the roses. If you live in an apartment, talk about security or the neighbors or parking. At your job, stop and chat with the person in the next workstation, as long as you do not interfere with their work. Even if you do not have any need to talk with the cleaning lady, talk with her anyway. Everyone needs human warmth and acknowledgment, and maybe she will know of something from her vantage point that will be enlightening to you. Simply wander around and make small talk. With time and familiarity, comfort will come. When you roam in your personal village, everyone benefits.

There is actually a business strategy called "management by wandering around." The supervisor makes it a point to spend time with many of the workers to find out exactly what they are doing and what their challenges are and what they need in order to succeed in their jobs. In one company, the CEO sometimes spends part of a day riding around with one of the truck drivers. He learns quickly the challenges these drivers are facing and what they need. After all, the job of a manager is to make sure that all workers are successful at their jobs. Face-to-face contact with their staff brings them closer to that goal. As a result, the job becomes more fun and satisfying for everyone, and as a by-product, productivity soars.

You can do the same thing by wandering around at school or in the dorm or in your neighborhood or in the bowling alley. Any place where you have a mix of people who share something in common with you is a good place to wander around. Some of those people will be receptive to your reaching out, even in very casual ways. As you do so, your net of people will keep expanding. Remember, most of the people you meet at school or work or in your neighborhood will be low on the intimacy scale. They may have meaning and enrich your time in that place, but with a few exceptions they will never become your close intimates. Talking with your teacher, sharing a joke or a bit of gossip with a fellow student, offering some useful information to a neighbor or co-worker-a great recipe, a new dress shop, the name of a good mechanic-is the lubricant which makes our daily lives work smoothly. Even something as simple as a smile or holding a door open for a passing stranger lights a bright place in the world. You do yourself and everyone you meet a favor if you find a way to make some kind of actual human contact as you pass.

The Places Where We Gather

We roam in many places, and each place has its own level of intimacy. Some social scientists have suggested that we divide our time between three places: First Place, Second Place and Third Place. First Place is our home environment with our immediate family. Second Place refers to our work or school environment, and Third Place refers to those public gathering places where people meet, mingle and find a sense of connection to the larger community. In reality, this is an artificial division. But the point is that we engage with people on a continuum of intimacy and activity that includes many places. For discussion's sake, let's pretend that these three places do exist distinctly. Later we will add some more designations to fill out the picture.

First Place

Your most intimate social interactions will most often happen within the confines of the family. You will either have a natural family or an alternative family or maybe a combination of both. Your First Place people-spouse, children, brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, close family friends and confidants-are the core foundation for your life. If this place is alive and vital, it is the refuge to which we can always return at the end of a hectic day.

As children, these people guide us and open resources for us by getting us into good schools, to good doctors and music teachers and enrolling us in Tae Kwon Do. Often it is our parents or close friends of the family who help us find our first job.

When we grow up, we first move into a transitional family usually made up of fellow students or friends either living together or nearby. In time we develop our own immediate family or alternative family. Then we have a whole other host of people who expand our most intimate circle. Much more about that later.

Isabelle, widowed and crippled with arthritis, still lived in her family home, but alone. Her daughter, Ruth, was her main contact in the world. Ruth took her to the doctor and shopping and managed to spend time with her several times a week. Ruth's three children had known grandma since they were born. The weekly contact Isabelle had with her grandchildren was the focal point of her life. Watching them grow and being a part of that experience gave her life meaning.

Isabelle's favorite granddaughter, Suzanne, experienced her grandmother as an anchor point in her life and confided in her about school and boys and her future. When Suzanne left for college, she wrote often to grandma and sometimes called. And when she got married Isabelle was in the front row. When Isabelle grew ill and was hospitalized Suzanne dropped everything to fly to her side. These two women nourished the link between them until the day Suzanne stood beside her grandmother's coffin with tears of gratitude. That connection across the generations was a thread of continuity that added fullness to both of their lives.

Your family members, even the more distant ones, offer an emotional sense of roots which bring a sense of security and offer nourishment to your life. In the Jewish tradition they call this extended family your mishpoche, (pronounced misch-po- ka) which means everyone who is related to you from the most intimate to the most remotely distant relative. These family members can sometimes open doors that you could never pry open yourself. And you do the same for them.

Don't forget the friends of the family. I have painted a picture of an ideal family. Of course, these often do not exist. Sometimes people who are distant or cut off from their immediate family will adopt or be adopted into an intimate family. If you have some of these people in your family system, treat them with respect and kindness, and remember them at important times. Though this adopted family member may be a close friend to your parents or children, do not forget that you too may be a very important person to them. They draw a sense of belonging and comfort by knowing you.

This is so important that in Japan older, isolated people have even taken to renting a family so that they can be near the comforting warmth of children and family life. The family earns a little money by opening up their home to a forgotten or seemingly discarded older person. The older person has children to play with, to buy presents for and family celebrations and events to sustain their spirits. It may sound commercial, but the alternative can be deadly, literally.

Second Place

Everyone has a job: the mom taking care of the kids; the student working at his or her studies; the high school student babysitting her younger siblings; the carpenter building houses; the accountant doing taxes. Regardless of what we do, most of us have an intense network associated with our work.

For those children where the immediate family is skimpy or dysfunctional, the school environment may provide additional people support to sustain them. Jamie's mother worked full time to support her children in a small apartment. Juggling childcare, her job and managing a home often left Jamie's mom tired and not as available to Jamie as either of them wanted. But at school Jamie found caring human contact with an understanding teacher and a circle of friends. What she had at school helped to soften the effects of her stressed family system. Her mother was relieved that the school offered this dimension to Jamie's life. Even when the family is strong, the school becomes a rich environment providing experiences and values that complement the family.

Phyllis lives alone and because of her intense shyness tends to be socially isolated. She struggles emotionally with the resistance inside herself to reach out and find friends. Even at church she tends to stay to herself. Though she is at retirement age, she continues to work because there she has a ready made circle of people who nourish her. As an experienced account executive in a bank, she must interact with customers and fellow workers in a way which transcends her shyness. Every person at her job is very important to her. She remembers their birthdays, the details of their families and their likes and dislikes. She shows up with birthday cakes and revels in stories about her co-worker's children. The people in the office are so important that she never misses a day. We may never know how important we are to some of the people at work. It is a gift to and from the highest place in our human spirit to treat every person in our work place with great kindness and respect.

So roam freely at work. What you will learn there will not only help you enhance your job performance, but will also help you to strengthen your personal relationships. Often it is at work where you will first meet some of the most important people in your life.

Third Place

Outside of home and work, people have always gravitated toward those physical places in their community where they can informally hang out with each other. Sociologists call these places the commons. That means they belong to everyone "in common." Everyone is welcome to come and hang out and interact. Today it could be the mall or the sidewalk or the park. In medieval times, the commons referred to the fields that belonged to the whole village. Everyone had a share of the field in which to plant crops. All were welcome to graze their cows on the common fields. Though the house was private, the streets and fields were considered the commons and available to everyone. Throughout time the commons has referred to the place where everyone in a particular group, family, neighborhood or town were entitled to gather whenever they wished. The family bedroom is private, but the living room or the kitchen can be the commons for a family. The work station for an account executive may be private, but the lunch room would be the commons where any of the workers could gather or come and go at will. In effect it is that place where the members of that group do not have to knock to enter and where everyone in that group is free to use the resources in that place.

For some, it is the Internet. For others it's the pub. In today's more populated world, there is comfort to be found in hanging out at a familiar place with others even if most of the people are strangers. At least they are all listening to the same musicians or drinking the same coffee or reading the same newspapers.

Often a Third Place commons is one created by some business like a coffee shop, bookstore or a food court. But they can also be town squares, parks and places where we can walk and promenade. On the Internet these electronic commons are called chat rooms.

In Bellevue, Washington, Ron Sher, a clever community builder, incorporated an attractive Third Place into his shopping center. The public gathering place is in the very middle of the center. Ron likes to think of it as the community living room. Clustered together are coffee shops, a food court, childcare, hairdressers, public chessboards, a coin shop and a wing of city hall. The public library has a small branch that draws more people than any other branch in the library system. All day long people roam in this common area to meet friends, have lunch and to take a break from the push of the day. In the morning, the mall walkers gather. Later, the disabled collect to talk, compare notes and get out of the weather. Business people have power-networking meetings at the coffee shop or in the food court. Moms, with little kids in tow, meet fellow moms for some adult company. In the afternoon, the teenagers troop in for food and to hang out with each other. At dinnertime, families show up for a quick meal in the ever-swirling circles of people. A stage has been set aside on the edge of the food court so that on Friday and Saturday evenings musicians perform, drawing large informal crowds of friends and neighbors.

The shopping center does not make a direct profit from this Third Place operation, but it does bring people into the adjacent stores. The real value of this commons is that it provides a community center in an otherwise apartment-dense, automobile-dominated, pedestrian-unfriendly environment. The shopping center prospers. The community prospers.

Margaret used her knowledge of hanging around in a Third Place to improve her life. She used the hang-out strategy to combat the loneliness of widowhood after her husband of 43 years passed away. Her family and the former neighbors had moved. She was dependent upon a phone call from her daughter for human contact. Margaret felt stranded. In her wanderings through the local shopping district, she noticed a cafe where retirees gathered every day. So she began to hang out every morning over a cup of tea and later in the day for lunch. At least for an hour a day she was with people, who at first were all strangers. In time, the regulars grew to recognize her and invited her to join them. Now she had a place where she was known by name and would be missed if she didn't show up. No longer was she totally dependent for contact on the weekly phone call from her daughter in a distant city.

Bob tells how a chance interaction in a Third Place answered a deep longing. He had lived in Hawaii for several months and, in spite of considerable effort, had been unsuccessful in connecting with any locals who shared his interest in Buddhist mysticism. So he began to hang out in a little bookstore-cafe where he could read about this topic. One day a woman at the next table noticed the title of his book and joined him. He soon discovered that she had lived in Hawaii all her life and knew many of the people he wanted to meet. After a lengthy visit she invited him to attend a meeting at her house. There he found a gathering of fellow travelers.

E-Place

The electronic world is a marvelous place for finding and interacting with people who share your common interests. So many people have begun to gather in the electronic environment that it deserves a name of its own. I call it E-Place. We tend to think of E-Place as the Internet, but remember we have developed a love affair with the telephone over the last many decades. For many people, the telephone is their link to others that lubricates the daily workings of their life. In a way, the television also provides us with a simple way to keep connected with the world around us, though that medium is one-way as of this writing. Television and radio connect us in real time to the events in our world.

For people who are shut-in or isolated, it is a window to the world. More recently, computers have given us the ability to locate almost any person who shares our common interest with just a few simple commands. If you are geographically isolated from the people who are important to you or do not know how to find them, the electronic world will fill the need very quickly. For shut-ins and the lonely the electronic community is a godsend. The electronic connections are essential for business and professional networking. Telephones and e-mails and chat rooms are good for enhancing our relationships. They allow us to maintain more frequent contact, which in turn strengthens our connection. But do remember that often, electronic connections tend to be single-stranded. Single-stranded means two people have a relationship with each other as a solo pair, with no other connections to others they both know. E-places are a good starting place and an excellent way to maintain contact, sometimes quite intense, with a broad community of people. We need many single-stranded connections to maintain variety, but if we do not balance our personal village with multi-stranded relationships as we roam, our lives can get out of balance. Chat rooms and conference calls are multi-stranded, but more about that later.

Informal Place The social scientists describe first, second and third place, but in reality that is only a simplified way of describing where people roam and interact. Actually we interact in many different places for which we have no labels. One of these public places is what I call Informal Place. Informal Place encompasses everything outside of First, Second, Third and E-Place. Informal place is your neighborhood, grocery stores, bus stops, back alleys, the list is endless.

An example of an informal place is the promenade, a commons with no commercial focus where people flock. Most cities have a promenade where people gather to walk, strut and look at each other. In the town square of many Southern European towns the entire population comes out every evening to walk back and forth, stopping to talk, taking different people by the arm for the short stroll. This promenade goes on every evening for a couple of hours. It is our nature to promenade. Teenagers have known this for a long time when they strut in front of each other or go cruising down the strip to see and be seen. Our hunter-collector brains will keep us searching through all the nooks and crannies of the places in our world. Even outside of formal gathering places, we will continue to find treasurers and people. Roaming every place where people are found and talking with those we meet will sometimes turn up surprising information and resources, nice additions that add spice and life to our own personal village.

Anchoring

When you have a good time roaming in your familiar haunts--the fabric shop, park, cafe, school-that good feeling becomes anchored to those places and you will feel nourished whenever you go back there. Anchoring is the basis for a sense of belonging. Anchoring is part of our human nature. It is a psychological term to describe our tendency to become emotionally attached to a place, an event or a physical sensation. We go back to that which is familiar because it makes us comfortable and at ease. It is our way of remembering the good things we would like to repeat and the bad things we want to avoid.

Having a great time with a friend in a restaurant will anchor us to the restaurant. When we go back to the restaurant, we feel good. We will want to go back to that friend and that restaurant and maybe even the same table. That is called a positive anchor. Of course if you have a dreadful experience someplace, you can develop a negative anchor. Then anytime you think about or go to that place you will become anxious, uncomfortable and maybe even have panic attacks.

Roaming

Sherry talks about when she lived in a high-rise in New York City. Each day she would go for walks on the street, talking with doormen, the street people and the shop owners. She knew them all by name, and they knew her. None of them knew she was a world-renowned psychologist, but they did know that she lived nearby. She tells how Horst who ran the butcher shop around the corner was one of her favorites. Every day she dropped in to look over Horst's selections of meats. And everyday Horst told her what she was going to have for dinner that night. Sherry felt known and somehow loved by Horst's control over her diet. Every afternoon she would take the elevator down to the street and wonder what he had for her that day. After Horst had defined her evening's meal, she talked with Natalie in the produce stand, bought a paper from Louie who had all the neighborhood news, then she picked out flowers at Sasha's stall. Every day Sherry roamed in her neighborhood. Roaming in the middle of that familiar cast of neighbors gave her life fullness and belonging. In her private life, she had her friends, colleagues and family members. But her anchor to the people and scenes on the street, and all the brief interactions that included, was a garnish that gave fuller meaning to being a New Yorker.

Roaming does take effort. Even if you're a natural, it helps to have a strategy. I will introduce you to three which we will talk about next.

3 Strategies for Roaming in Your Personal Village

1. Wander Around and Hang Out.
2. Make Many Brief Appearances and Keep Showing Up.

3. Apply the Principle of Seven.

Wander around and hang out

This is what my father did to build his strong circle of associates and friends. This ancient way has worked for a million years. Each of you has a natural territory in which you roam. Maybe it is your work place or the neighborhood or a haunt where you have a positive anchor and a place where you feel comfortable. It could be a cafe the market, church or your neighborhood. It could be any of your many places where you roam to collect treasures.

Research shows that relationships tend to build between people who inhabit the same places. It's simple. Just put yourself in a location where others are doing the same thing as you, then wander around and hang out. That is what Margaret did when she purposely hung out in the cafe with other seniors, and that is what Bob did when he began to hang out in the bookstore cafe in Hawaii. Jack used the same idea. Jack was wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy. Wherever he went, people gave him a wide berth because he looked, talked and moved awkwardly. It was very difficult for him to make friends. His attendant suggested he try hanging out in a nearby meditation center. It was not easy because even though the people there were superficially friendly, they too were uncomfortable with his awkward way of moving and of talking. But Jack was persistent and applied two additional strategies for roaming that I will talk about next: make continued, brief appearances and keep showing up. Probably some of the members of the center wished he would go away because his presence made them uncomfortable, but Jack did not stop showing up for meditation programs, and he hung around during the following fellowship time. After a while, a few people made the effort to talk with him, and eventually he came to be accepted as one of the regulars.

Make many brief appearances and keep showing up

This strategy follows naturally from hanging out. By nature people want to engage, but they are cautious. From past experience we all know there are individuals who will invade our space, take advantage of us or hurt us emotionally. In addition, almost all of us have a hidden, inner belief that we are inadequate or that there is something wrong with us. The risk of being invaded or hurt once again or of having that universal inner belief that we are inadequate be exposed, causes most people to initially be on guard. We tend to proceed into new relationships with caution as a natural way of guarding ourselves against hurt. By applying the strategy of making many brief contacts-on the turf of the new person and appropriate to the common ground, trust and comfort can develop in a way that is natural for both of you.

The Principle of Seven

There is actually a scientific basis for hanging out and making brief appearances. Studies have defined how many contacts must occur before comfort can develop between new people. According to Harvard psychologist, Dr. George Miller, the average human mind will keep track of events up to about seven. The number of events is fewer for some and more for others, but for most people it is about seven. After approximately seven events, the brain will make an internal accounting shift and lump them all into the category of many. The mind simply stops counting after a while, and most people experience this internal shift as "familiar." With this shift to familiarity also comes increased comfort.

After about the seventh contact the internal shift to familiarity occurs. It is almost like the brain says, "Oh, she has been around for a while. She's an OK person." At that point you shift from the status of outsider' to insider. Everything gets easier.

Professionals use this method to build a network of colleagues and potential business contacts. Mediators use this technique to slowly build up trust and familiarity for resolving conflicts and negotiating contracts. Sales representatives use the Principle of Seven to build trust as a base for more fruitful business relationships.

Repeated brief contacts work. The professionals make it work for them, and you can make it work for you. Erik did.

Erik described for me how he purposefully went about meeting a woman in his apartment building. For months he established familiarity by simply saying, "Hello," when they passed in the hall. Then one day she left her car lights on. A knock on her door earned a hurried thank you as she scurried away to turn off the lights. Two months later they encountered each other in the laundry room where they exchanged small talk about the weather. He knew she sometimes went to the storage lockers on Saturday morning to get her bicycle, so he began organizing his locker at those times. One morning she showed up and noticed his scuba gear. She was curious and stopped to talk. They were getting acquainted though all these "chance" encounters.

After many months Erik knew he was interested and decided the time was ripe to see if she was too. He went to her apartment and asked if she had any quarters for the washing machine, even though he had a pocket full of quarters. A week later he dropped by to borrow a cup of flour for pancakes. The following day she showed up to borrow some lemons. This time she stayed, and they talked more about diving and about their work and their families. The following Sunday he invited her for breakfast. She accepted.

From there it was easy to learn that she was interested in pursuing the relationship. His patient efforts over several months had paid off with a sense of familiarity and safety. He had conveyed to her the attitude that he would respect her boundaries and not hurry her and that he was consistent. He succeeded in becoming one of the insiders in her world. He had also given her the signals that he was interested in getting to know her better. This was many years ago. His patience paid off. Today they are married and have two children.

Erik's approach may seem a bit old-fashioned to some. Many people are in such a rush to find contact that they do not take this much time, yet this style is preferable. I often see people who married after a very brief courtship, only to discover later that they did not share any common ground beyond the initial attraction. They rushed into total commitment only to find total disappointment. The chance of a relationship developing some staying power is much better with Erik's patient, methodical approach.

A series of brief encounters where two people have a chance to watch each other in action over time is a powerful tool in building trust and mutual comfort. Brief repeated contacts provide the mechanism behind the strategies of hanging out and wandering around that we talked about earlier. There are some basic rules of behavior that will help to make your roaming more effective. Susan RoAne is a professional networker and author. She advises frequent contacts in developing relationships and encourages people to roam in their people circles very much the way I have been talking about. Here is a condensed version of her advice:

Roaming Effectively

-Treat people with respect, courtesy and honesty.

-Do what you say you are going to do.

-Listen with your ears, eyes, head and heart.

-Reach out to others when you do not need anything in return from them.

-Treat people as unique beings with a life and heart, not as a contact on your list.

-Be liberal with your praise, and pass that praise onto others.

-Express your thanks for all the gifts you have received from others.

-Do good deeds for others.

-Have fun and laugh a lot. As you can see, roaming in your personal village can lead to a wide range of relationships from the least intimate to the most intimate. Roaming is the place to start when people do not present themselves naturally in your life. Even if you have a good circle of close people already, you will enrich your life by roaming around like our hunter-collector ancestors. Find out what is in your surrounding world. The treasures you will unearth will be surprising.

The next step on our journey from least intimate to most intimate is that collection of people with whom you have something in common-anything. I call these folks your neighbors. So far we have been talking about how to roam among strangers who can become known to us. Another group of people who are important are neighbors, people who happen to live or work close to where we find ourselves. Developing relationships with them is more than just random roaming and though it requires all the things I talked about here there is more. Lets turn our attention to developing relationships with our neighbors.

IN SUMMARY

-You will find. people in every, setting where you spend time: First Place, Second Place, Third Place, E-Place and Informal Place.

-Be persistent and purposeful about roaming in your personal village.

-Wander around and make small talk with anyone who is receptive.

-Find a hangout and become a regular.

-Initially, make many brief appearances to develop familiarity.

-Keep showing up.

-Be as curious in your exploration as our hunter-collector ancestors.

The Principle of Seven is the science for establishing familiarity.

Excerpted from Personal Village © Copyright 2003 by Marvin Thomas, MSW. Reprinted with permission by Milestone. All rights reserved.