“Do you take the paper?”

The question threw me off the first time I heard it — what in the world is she talking about? “Do you take the paper?” she repeated in the sweetest southern accent you’ve ever heard. “She’s too young,” another replied, which made me laugh. I was at least 40 at the time.

Admittedly the youngest by 20–50 years, I held onto every word that dropped out of these women’s mouths. They ‘took the [news]paper’ every morning, poured over it with their coffee, and used phones that were mounted to the wall — with cords. Email? If they must.

Time stood still for me in the presence of these women. I longed for their maturity, their grace, their perspective.

My news comes at me fast — like a slap in the face that I didn’t want, but I stuck my cheek in the path anyway. My news is disturbing. It’s polarizing. It’s lonely. It’s scary. It doesn’t stop.

Their news is printed onto paper and tossed onto their lawns as the sun rises, it’s unfolded and scanned for anything particularly interesting. It’s paced. It stops when they want to refill their coffee cup, and then it only picks up again when they are ready.

I drool.

I drool for their quiet calm, uninterrupted by text dings, Alexa alerts, and watch vibrations to keep moving. I drool for the peace that permeates their beings.

Today, information is flowing faster than a librarian’s wildest dreams yet social scenes are making our kids lonelier than any in history. We advance. We regress. It’s not so much the problems that we encounter that cause concern — as it is our approach to solving them. We keep facing forward, searching and searching for new answers, new discoveries, new research.

What if the answers today are the same as they were yesterday? What if time is just changing outfits to match the decades and the ones of us who have been here the longest are the only ones who can see through it all?

It’s not that previous generations did everything right or that we should go back in time. It’s that they’ve seen, they’ve lived, and they’ve learned. They know all about loneliness, all about children, all about community and the many faces love takes to heal our fractures. They know.

It’s up to us to listen.

#community #itmatters