1: Back in the early 2000s, a fatal shooting occurred in the Clifton Heights neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio.
“The community was disturbed and anxious, looking for answers,” Daniel Coyle writes in Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment.
A few days later, a local civic organization asked Peter Block, a neighborhood resident, to lead a public gathering. Peter is an author, consultant, and facilitator. For more than sixty years, he has worked with all types of groups, including neighborhoods, businesses, and governments.
A large group of residents, police, and media showed up at a local high school. “All expecting,” Daniel writes, “a conventional postcrisis event in which authorities would offer official statements, reassurances, and a structured action plan.”
But that’s not what happened. Peter began by addressing the shared concern about the shooting.
Then he made a request: “Please break into groups of three with people you know the least.”
Surprised, they followed his directions.
2: Then Peter posed a question for the groups to answer: “When did you start caring about Clifton Heights?”
At first, people seemed confused. Then the room buzzed with conversation. “People started talking, sharing stories, histories, family moments, stories of connection,” Daniel notes.
After twelve minutes, Peter asked for quiet. He then asked a second question: “What is your contribution to making this neighborhood less safe than it might be?”
“There was another moment of awkwardness and confusion,” Daniel writes, “as people processed the query: My contribution to the neighborhood being less safe?”
Peter simply looked out at the audience and smiled.
“Then, they started to talk,” Daniel shares. “Someone talked about how they had stopped volunteering for after-school mentoring. Someone else talked about how they wished they attended more community events, how they knew only a few of their neighbors.”
It was a tough question, but it shifted the conversation from blame to personal responsibility.
After twelve more minutes, Peter asked for silence again. Then he posed a third question: “Tell each other what gifts you received during this conversation.”
Daniel describes what happened next as another moment of “shared presence.”
“In the weeks and months after that gathering,” Daniel writes, “life in Clifton Heights underwent a subtle but profound change.”
Peter says: “People knew their neighbors better, took ownership over their lives more. And that led us to have similar meetings over in other neighborhoods and schools, and each time it was the same story. When people feel more connected, they start to live that way.”
3: What Peter does is to create “a firm, clear space that invites people to switch on connective attention,” Daniel observes, “a space in which they can let go, sense something greater than themselves, and make meaning together.”
Peter wasn’t telling people how to think differently. He was creating an experience that allowed them to see themselves and their neighbors differently.
“Everybody walks around with a story in their head to justify themselves, and all those stories are basically fictions,” Peter states.
“The real question is, is the story in your head useful?” he observes. “A lot of people get stuck in a story that’s not useful, stories of isolation and complaint. But if they experience another way of being together with other people, it can change that story.
“And to do that,” Peter says, “you have to put people into provocative moments and let them learn from their own experience. You’re not a dictator; you’re a designer.”
The idea of being a designer points to something bigger, Daniel explains: “The idea that meaning is never made by force but by shaping conditions where we can experience receptive stillness, where we can let go of narrow-beam attention and allow something deeper to unfold.”
Daniel believes these moments, these connections, are always close at hand. They happen in small, everyday moments.
They can also be intentionally created. Connection can’t be commanded. But you can create the conditions that allow it to happen.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: When you bring people together, are you trying to create connection, or simply hoping it happens?
Action: At your next gathering, intentionally create an opportunity for people to connect. Put them with someone they know less well and ask a question that invites a meaningful conversation.
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