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Encounter, Time and Place. Neighbors become friends.

Our neighbors are leaving.

A~ and K~, and their children, T~ and L~, are moving to North Africa.

We love them and we’re desperately sad they’re going.

Movie nights; pasta-making nights; sharing tools; shopping favors; book-lending; baby-sitting swaps; recipe-swaps; music-swaps; car-lending; taking both sets of children to the playground; doing multi-family yard sales together; kids’ sleep-overs; kids trashing each other’s places; sharing stresses of work or lack of work; easter egg hunts from the age the kids could only just walk; singing Happy Birthday in English, French and Spanish; A~ jabbing our daughter with an epipen to save her from an anaphylactic reaction to nuts; meals on their back deck; bbqs in our back yard; chats on their stoop; chats on our stoop; chats while snow-shoveling; chat’s beside storm-blown trees; chats beside fire/police/ambulance visits; chats about God, science, history, the future, family life, everything; sharing in grief of losing my dad; K~ sharing story of losing his dad; welcoming each other’s visiting parents, relatives and friends; keeping M~ partying to 4am on New Year’s Day; learning California Stars on the guitar. And so much more.

That’s the both the substance and the fruit of the friendship that’s grown over the years. Friendships are emergent. You can’t decide ahead of time who is going to be your close buddy. You’ll totally freak people out if you do. And not every person needs to become a ‘friend’. There is plenty satisfaction and reward in a simple, cordial relationship. But we’ve had the enormous pleasure of real friendship grow over the years.

It’s not that complicated. Friendship or just good relationship can emerge from simply being around – a combination of encounter (face to face meeting), time (frequency and continuity) and place (meeting in different contexts). That’s all we had really, none of us set out to make friends of each other. But encounter, time and place were the foundation upon which reciprocity, a bit of risk taking, reasonable boundaries, shared and divergent interests bore fruit in a deep affection for one another.

Along with our other amazing neighbors, they’ve given us such a sense of belonging to somewhere, of mattering to someone. It’s been so rich, and so unspeakably fulfilling, to live life on this street with A~, K~, T~ and L~.

God bless you, friends.

Two talks this Thursday March 1st, Boston – Taking Relationships Seriously

Those of you who have read this blog over time know that relationships are a recurrent theme; call it an obsession. There are two talks at an event I’ve arranged this Thursday March 1st. The first at noon is on “Relational Thinking”, by Michael Schluter, who has pioneered not just Relational Thinking but relational practice, for 30+ years. The second, at 1pm, is from Jonathan Rushworth, from their report “Tranforming Capitalism from Within: A Relational Approach to the Purpose, Performance and Assessment of Companies”.

If you’re in Boston on Thursday please come along! -Tweet me at @sifowler if you think you might come. Details below.

Taking Relationships Seriously

Lunchtime brown-bag presentations and Q&A with Michael Schluter and Jonathan Rushworth

Thursday March 1^st

Park Street Church, Boston (entrance on Park Street)

12:00-12:45 An Introduction to Relational Thinking

12:45-1pm Coffee & Mingle!

1:00-2pm A Relational Business Charter

Relational Thinking: Personal and social wellbeing depends upon the quality of relationships within families and communities, and within and between organizations. This presentation and Q&A will introduce you to Relational Thinking; an approach to society’s challenges that places relationships – not individual rights and freedoms or material wealth – at the center of our decision-making, purposes and actions.

You’ll hear how thinking relationally can lead to innovative and practical solutions to these challenges. For over 30 years Michael Schluter has taken the relational heart of “love your neighbor as yourself” and applied it to domains as diverse as conflict resolution in Sudan, Sunday trading in the UK, organizational stakeholder assessments in South Africa, the impact of work-life balance on family breakdown in Australia, philanthropic investment vehicles in the UK, and more.

Relational Business Charter: Since the financial collapse of 2008, there has been much economic and political hand-wringing about what is to be done to address systemic economic instability. The typical solutions are through regulatory or tax responses. In this presentation and Q&A, Jonathan Rushworth will argue that these problems can be addressed if companies put relationships with stakeholders at the heart of their operations. The presentation summarizes their recent report: “Transforming Capitalism from Within: a Relational Approach to the Purpose, Performance, and Assessment of Companies.”

I welcome you to join either or both of these presentations and encourage you to come at 11:45 or 12:45 to mingle with each other and meet Jonathan and Michael.

Please RSVP to me, Simon Fowler (simon.fowler@virgin.net). I encourage you to pass the invitation to others you think may be interested and ask also that they RSVP to me. If you are unable to attend but are interested to know more about Relational Thinking please also contact me!

Jonathan Rushworth was a partner with a major City of London law firm for 26 years, specializing in company and finance law. He retired from practice in 2007 and is Chairman of Relationships Global.

Dr Michael Schluter CBE is an economist, author, and social entrepreneur. He worked as an economist with the World Bank and a Research Fellow for the International Food Policy Research Institute. He founded the Jubilee Centre, Relationships Foundation and Concordis International. He is now Chief Executive of Relationships Global.

Where’s home?

I’ve been away for the last five weeks (and silly busy in the weeks before that, hence the blog silence) but within two weeks I wanted to come ‘home’. The weird thing about that feeling is that ‘home’ used to be, and in some ways still is, England. I’ve only lived in the US for 7 of my 43 years, but I wanted to be back here.

Actually, it’s not the US that feels like home, but the street I currently live on. I never before such a sense of belonging somewhere. So even though I was ‘away’ seeing my mom and siblings and wonderful friends I’ve known for decades, I needed a physical location to feel ‘home’. I mean a location, not just a house, that’s associated with people and relationships and a shared history (albeit fairly short).

I don’t know anyone now who lives in the town in which I spent the first 23 years of my life, and I don’t know anyone in the town where my parents retired to in the early ’90s. My sisters are scattered between across England, Scotland, Wales and New Zealand, and my friends are likewise scattered. So the only place I have a day to day continuity of relationship is where I currently live.

If I could gather my friends and family in England together in one place, where I could ‘pop in’ or where I’d bump into them serendipitously in the course of days and weeks, then for sure that would be home. But I can’t, so it isn’t. At least for now, this is.