How to be a villager, part 5: Open the door

There's a thing where I'm from called "The Seattle Freeze." It's a particular cultural malady of my hometown where people can be friendly, certainly, but only to a point. Ask to get lunch? "Great, let's do it sometime!" Vague, noncommittal, and it usually doesn't happen.

For whatever peculiar reason, a lot of Seattleites are great at chatting but not great at letting people in. Maybe it's the grey weather, the ambitious transplants, or something generational. Who knows. Either way, making new friends there can be genuinely hard.

Seattle is also not immune to the particularly urban habit of putting your head down and looking away when you pass someone on the street. So much so that for a college communications class project — where we had to choose a social rule to break — I chose that one. It was extremely uncomfortable. Most hellos went unanswered, and the occasional smile was met with a frown and a quickening of pace.

When I first moved to Denver I was pleasantly surprised at how many people greeted each other on the street and actually followed through on plans. It was a breath of fresh air. And while a lot of that is still true six years later, I've noticed that the more crowded the city becomes — and the more our cultural landscape promotes suspicion — the less that easy greeting happens.

That's why when my neighbor friends and I opened our doors to our fellow apartment dwellers one crisp autumn evening, we were surprised at how successful it turned out.

Kathleen, Kristen, and I had been talking about a pre-Halloween neighbor party for a couple of months, and like a trio of overeager dorm RA’s, we made it happen. Kristen and Kathleen spent an afternoon handwriting invitations for every apartment door while I shouted encouragement through my window screen. The night of the party we bundled up, covered a folding table with Halloween treats, and politely heckled neighbors coming home from work to join us for snacks and conversation.

As the temperatures dropped we moved inside, and incredibly — even with the barrier of a closed door — nearly ten people knocked and cautiously entered.

More than one person mentioned how nervous they'd been to say yes, but how surprised they were at how great everyone turned out to be. Phone numbers were exchanged for dog-sitting. Multiple people suggested doing it again. And everyone left feeling full — of Halloween cookies certainly, but mostly of unexpected conversation and connection.

Here's what I discovered that night: going first and opening our door removed the unspoken barrier between neighbors who had been living parallel lives for months. The result was simple and remarkable — after the initial nerves, everyone was just grateful for the chance to connect.

I've seen this same thing play out again and again. The hello to a stranger on the street, the name finally put to the face of your upstairs neighbor — these small acts remind our brains that other people aren't as scary as we're often taught to think. And the cascade can be tremendous. A kind smile from a passing stranger can turn a bad day around. A neighbor's name becomes a regular greeting at the mailbox, which becomes a request for butter, which becomes — who knows — a cocktail at the bar down the street.

So here's your final lesson in how to be a villager: open the door. Whether it's metaphorical — a smile, a hello, a handwritten invite slipped under a neighbor's door — or the door to your literal home, you're creating the conditions for connection. Most times when I've taken the risk of engaging with the people already in my vicinity, it turns out we were both hungry for it.

Most of us are waiting for someone to go first. So, why not let it be you?