The Pace of the Sidewalk

I needed the reminder first, but that isn't how my Saturday started.

Sometimes the week pulls my attention into emails, deadlines, decisions, disagreements, and all the other pieces of community life that tend to gather around a desk. After a while, the town can start to feel more like a list of issues than a place full of people.

By Saturday, I needed to leave the desk behind for a while. So I walked Main Street.

There was no real agenda to it. For once, I wasn’t headed to a meeting, and I wasn’t trying to turn the afternoon into anything too productive. I just needed to be back in the middle of town for a bit, not thinking about it from the perspective of a headline, but moving through it at the pace of the sidewalk.

At that pace, it's easier to notice the storefronts you usually pass in a rush as you drive down the road. You have a chance to read the hand-painted writing in the windows and notice a little “Red Flannel Town” sticker on a shop door. You can stop long enough for conversations that were never on your calendar. You can hear what people are working on, what they are worried about, and what they are excited to see happen next.

I spent a good part of the day talking with fellow business owners. Not in any official capacity. Just checking in. Listening to what's been happening. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, how much room those conversations can make for collaboration, especially if your only view of town comes through meetings, emails, secondhand complaints, and small-town politics.

At one point, I found myself inside a building I have admired for years, realizing there were still parts of it I had never really seen. That probably says something about the way we assume we know a place just because we grew up there. But that's a thought for another day.

Cedar Springs still has the ability to surprise me.

Maybe that was the reminder I needed.

Because if you care about a town, there will be days when that care starts to feel like work. There will be arguments, decisions, misunderstandings, and long stretches where the problems get more attention than the people. That's not unique to Cedar Springs. It's just part of community life anywhere.

What I took from Saturday was that the town isn't just its points of disagreement. It isn't only process and policy, either.

It's the person unlocking a storefront in the morning. It's the business owner trying something new even though the safer choice would have been to leave things alone. It's the old building with more history upstairs than most people will ever see from the sidewalk. And it's the conversation that starts casually and ends with two people realizing they want the same thing, even if they have been coming at it from different angles.

That is the part I needed to step back into.

Sometimes you just have to move at the pace of the sidewalk, open a door, and have a conversation. Look up at the buildings and let the place surprise you again.

I needed that reminder, but I doubt I’m the only one.