It’s Vital
Before I was 13, my family and I had moved at least seven times. That makes me an expert on the adventures and challenges connected with moving from one place to another. It can be hard on a kid, hard on a teenager, and hard on an adult, even an older one like I am now.
I moved to Portland with my wife Kim and our small dog in June 2022. We bought our house in Beaumont-Wilshire a few weeks later.
Why do I mention all this? Because feeling new, alone, or uprooted, like a stranger in a strange land, is common in 21st Century America. Change is in the air, much of it scary.
…feeling new, alone, or uprooted, like a stranger in a strange land, is common in 21st Century America.
Political angst and polarization. Debates over race and gender. Climate change, air and water heating up causing heat domes, making some of us nostalgic for 1970, when few even contemplated such rapid transformations of the Earth’s climate.
We used to be better at this. But battered by COVID and other recent traumas, many of us hole up in our homes, watch a lot of Netflix, play video games, and try to shut out the big bad dangerous world.
But that doesn’t work. It results in loneliness, disengagement, fear, and often outright panic and anger.
What does work is community. Here in Portland a year or so ago, I knew only my wife, my nearby daughter and son-in-law, and a handful of others. Not enough to form a community — only a small kernel of one.
So, we reached out. My wife and I joined NE Village PDX, and discovered a small, vibrant group of fellow older folks who wanted to help others and make connections. I also reached out to this newsletter’s editor, Susan Trabucco, and in so doing enmeshed myself in yet another vibrant, often buoyant community.
I connected with the Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club, too, where I try to spread the word about climate change and the need to alter the way we relate to and envision our natural environment.
My story isn’t special, but there may be lessons here for others who feel lonely or disconnected, or are looking for meaning they don’t find in their current situations. Reaching out is good. Exploring options. Finding new friends and colleagues. Connecting with neighbors.
It turns out that making connections isn’t an option — it’s a necessity.
Chris Rauber and his wife, Kim Williams, moved to Portland and B-W in the summer of 2022 after many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked as a journalist at the S.F. Business Times and other publications. He was born in Oregon.