When considering what kind of town we would like Harvard to become, the fostering of community should be high on the priorities of its Master Plan.
We lead busy lives, engrossed in details small and numerous. For parents of young children, scheduling issues alone can overwhelm a Cray supercomputer. Later, through high school and college, new challenges await: guidance into early adulthood, the jujitsu required to finance a college education, and the launch of the fledglings into self-sufficiency.
Empty nesters have different concerns: aging parents, careers on track or not, and the boomerang of young adults returning to the home. Finally, in older age, issues such as a shoveled path or a trip to the grocery store become larger events than before.
All of this occurs in our rural suburbia, a community once bound by the interdependency of its residents, whose citizens have been left isolated and car-dependent in more recent times because of the rural setting that brought them here.
The health of a community grows in proportion to the opportunities neighbors have to share their stories. When the camaraderie of the school years ends, we may find that there are fewer “friends” around than we thought. And for those without children or whose kids have grown up and left, there may be none at all.
So can those lost interactions be restored? And how can their frequency be increased and encouraged? In his book, “Design for Ecological Democracy,” Randolph Hester argues for the creation and encouragement of potential nodes of interaction, places where chance meetings happen, gossip is exchanged, relationships are renewed, and community is fostered.
For Harvard, with its large, isolated building lots and long driveways into woods, these places are where we meet: the Transfer Station, the library, the General Store, the Center on the Common, and Town Hall. We are drawn together as a community by shared experiences: at the Fourth of July, at a game, returning a library book, or getting coffee at the General.
These places are where the informal business of the town gets done; where we cease to be isolated individuals and become part of a larger whole. Although this is not easy to accomplish with busy schedules and the structure of our 21st century lives, the more we see and talk and get to know each other, the stronger our community will be.
For something as important yet vaporous as “community” the choices we make in our planning decisions affect what sort of place we will live in or just pass through. We come together in the places of contact and come apart when we don’t see each other for the trees.
Mario Cardenas is a resident of Oak Hill Road
