Most folks who stay in one place long enough already know what Bob and I are just now finding out. If you build social capital with a particular group of people, at some point you can expect dividends.
Wikipedia describes a dividend as a payment made by a corporation to its shareholders, usually as a distribution of profits.
As children we were taught to give freely of our time and energy and so we did. We were also taught to expect reciprocation and fair treatment from others. What we didn’t learn was what happens if you live long enough in one particular place.
Shortly after my sixteenth birthday my parents moved for the eighth time. We had lived in one place for seven years where I felt at home and accepted, even though I had arrived there as the new kid on the block when my peers were already nine years old.
It was a sad day when I said goodbye to my two best friends. We wrote letters but lost touch when I began moving around the country. This was long before cell phones and social media. I left home within a year and fled town the next year to drift west, catching rides with my thumb and sleeping on floors.
Bob also had a socially fragmented childhood. His family moved to West Africa when he was nine and he was packed off to boarding school in Switzerland a few years later. After graduation he picked a university with mountains and stayed put for twenty years. He was better than I at keeping his friendships intact and routinely talks on the phone to his school mates from Ghana, Lugano and Colorado.
After Bob and I met we started flying again, living for a year in one spot, six months in the next. We spent four years on Maui and then dove back into our travel spree.
Three years later we settled down in Pittsboro, North Carolina, a place so community-minded they created their own currency which they aptly dubbed The Plenty. We had found our people and decided to take the plunge. Making a commitment to our new community, we began proving ourselves in the same way we have done everywhere else. “Always take the high road” is our mantra and we strive to give without expectations. It’s sobering to realize how many social capital accounts we’ve started and left behind.
After four and a half years in our new idyllic paradise we came unstuck again and found ourselves abroad. But this time we decided to keep the house and return home. I type that tentatively because the concept of home still eludes us. When you’ve been homeless these many years, it’s hard to say the word with conviction.
We returned a year ago and were immediately struck with how easily we slid back into step with the people we’d left behind. I picked up my phone and had a rolodex of tried and true resources at my fingertips. Around town we encountered twice as many familiar faces as not. How humbling it was to realize these seemingly unearned profits were coming from social capital we’d invested more than a year before.
When I shared this with my sister-in-law Darla I discovered she was well aware of social capital dividends. She lives with my brother John in a small town where her parents, their parents, her children and grandchildren have forged an incredible legacy of respectability. How amazing it must be to talk with someone who knew your parents or do business with someone you played with as a child!
Now it’s our turn. After all these years of investing in community we have finally arrived at the pot of gold. Everything is so easy these days that we feel like we’re coasting when in reality we are just not starting from scratch, not having to prove ourselves to a fresh set of people, not investing energy and walking away from the rewards.
For the first time one of our social capital accounts is distributing dividends and that’s something to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
