Neighbours

A civil chat

I was at a meeting recently where I was reminded of how civil we humans are actually able to be when discussing challenging issues with people who have opposing viewpoints.

It makes a nice change to much of what we’re seeing in some parts of politics and society at the moment.

Maybe it is possible to be good neighbours.

Just helping out

Just the other day, I saw something which made me stop in my tracks and think.

A friend was doing some work on their house. They’d had new windows installed in their weatherboard home, which included replacing some of the boards. Being good DIY folk, they were finishing the job themselves.

Now if you’ve never had to do maintenance work on a timber weatherboard home, you may not appreciate how gnarly this is. Everything is either finicky, or just plain hard work. Especially scraping paint off the old weatherboards, one board at a time.

Anyway, my friend had another mate helping him, and they spent most of the morning working on it.

And then…

Just after lunchtime, they were starting to paint, and their neighbour wandered over, and starting to paint with them.

Amazing.

Neighbours helping each other.

Just helping out.