TOUCH YOUR NEIGHBOUR’S HEART

TOUCH YOUR NEIGHBOUR’S HEART

WAITING FOR OPPORTUNITY

Do not wait for a good opportunity to start building up friendly relations with your neighbour. Now is the time to do it and the most effective way of doing so is to reach out to your neighbour. Why wait for the one across the fence to take the first step when you can do it yourself?
There are numerous ways in which you can reach out and help. If there is illness in your neighbours’ house, you can volunteer your help in some way or the other. If the mother in the family is ill, you can offer to look after the children, to send them to school with your own, to do some grocery shopping for her or to send them food for a day or two.
If there are working mothers in the neighbourhood, you can offer to keep an eye on the children or to keep them occupied when the parents are not at home. When any family goes out on a holiday, you can offer to water their plants or to keep an eye on their house or apartment. By just being alert and watchful we may find countless opportunities to reach out to one another, but very often we are callous and unfeeling and do not even know when calamity strikes a neighbour.
Recently, when there was a death in our locality, neighbours who lived in a cottage less than 20 feet away were not even aware of the fact. There was loud talk, noise and music from their house until some outsider rang them up and informed them of the demise and requested them for silence to show respect for the dead and consideration for the bereaved.
Had there been better understanding and reaching out between the neighbours, such a situation would never have arisen. Each for himself and God for all is a policy that does not pay dividends. Living as we do in society, we have an obligation towards our neighbours and reaching out can help to build a friendly bond which can be the basis of good neighbourliness.