You're going to write something today!

And you're going to hate it!

Hey, Runners!

I’ve come to realize in recent years that there are very few problems to which community is not the answer.

There is a phenomenon known as the Roseto effect, named for Roseto, Pennsylvania.  If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers,” then you may have heard of it.

Anyway, in the 1950s, when heart disease was on the rise around the country, the people in Roseto, Pennsylvania had virtually none. Researchers examined exercise and diet, and found that their diet was not particularly healthy, they didn’t exercise a whole lot, and they were overweight and obese at the same rates as everyone else in America.

Think about that for a minute; heart disease is the leading cause of death in America. These people smoked, drank, ate, got fat… and didn’t get heart disease.

In the end, the researchers realized that what made them different was community.

Roseto is named after the town in Italy where they’d all grown up together. They just took their community and moved it here. They spent time together. They sat on their porches at night and visited. They all raised all the kids together. When anyone needed help, everyone gathered to help them.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that since I first read it some fifteen years ago.

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We are born to be in community

In my first post this week, I told you that you were not going to be writing at the start of this challenge, but learning how to be a writer. Part of this approach is so that the things that create the stress that blocks us from writing create less stress.