Check Your Elevation
Once again thousands of people will storm the Sidney Lanier Bridge this month for the Southeast Georgia Health System 2017 Bridge Run. It’s a great event, speaking as one with experience with both running and walking the bridge during this event in recent years. I can’t make up my mind if it’s easier or harder than a typical race. It’s got a long uphill, yet it feels like the downhill is about as long too (must be my imagination though). Few will keep up a “regular” pace; we’re either running faster or slower than what we do locally where a few feet of rise is enough to wind us.
The only way for locals to train for the Bridge Run is to run or walk on the bridge. We can’t really practice hills anywhere else. The only problem with that plan is the cars whizzing by at sixty m.p.h. I trained on the bridge for my first Bridge Run and quickly determined I don’t have the fortitude to trust my fellow humans who may or may not be updating their Facebook statuses while driving just feet away from me. So I stay at sea level now for the most part, and I don’t worry about training on the bridge. I hope that race day will take care of itself. If I crawl up one side, I can always sprint down the other, right?
This is just one of the challenges of living at sea level. And don’t get me wrong, I like living at sea level. But high ground comes in handy when training for a race… and for escaping floods too. We were reminded of this last fall when most of us evacuated ahead of Hurricane Matthew, heading inland and uphill to safety. Fortunately, we were spared the worst in these parts, but the challenges of life at sea level became readily apparent. We’d all prefer to be looking down, not up, at a crashing wave.
Those of us who don’t physically live at higher elevations get to choose higher ground in other parts of our life, regardless. This world has all kinds of challenges that come at us in waves, and we do better when we can stay above those waves too. The problem is that it is too easy to gradually slide down hill without realizing how far we’ve fallen. If we let things slip gradually over time, it can catch up with us when we find out selves looking up an inescapable wave like the ones in disaster films. Let me share an example: civil discourse. Whether we are talking about a Facebook group, a homeowners association, a local community, a state, or our nation, civil discourse is what allows us to work together and move forward. When we don’t treat each other civilly, we can’t accomplish much at all.
Sometimes we shorthand civility to mean being polite, but it’s about more than that. It’s about respecting one another and seeking shared understanding. It involves listening to one another, and not labeling one another. Civility is hard work, but it’s how we manage to work together instead of devolving into name-calling and infighting. As challenges come our way, threatening to crash over us like waves, civility is the high ground that lets us ride them out together, and not drown alone. If we lose it altogether, we might not weather the storms that will undoubtedly come our way.
There are many places in our lives where we might want to evaluate our own elevation in comparison to the high ground. How high is the ground we stand on when it comes to loving our neighbors? How high is the ground we stand on in terms of engagement in our communities? What is our relative elevation in the area of gossip? We might ask how often we are tearing others down instead of building them up?
We can’t always train for the big things in life; some things are only experienced once. If we’re going to excel when the big things come along we need to have practiced on the small things. Can’t run the bridge? Run a flight of stairs. Can’t solve world hunger? Feed someone in your community. Can’t solve political problems? Don’t demonize everyone with whom you disagree. Worried that civility is dead? Rethink that negative Facebook comment you’re about to post. Living at low elevations is great for some things (the beach!), and challenging for others (hills – boo!). For those of us who live where elevation is measured in double digits or less, we might want to take the opportunity to go higher now and then.
