Life is more fun if you participate

The venues are different, but the problem is the same.
A high school athletic director looks out at a gymnasium on the night of a good basketball match-up and sees too many empty seats.
A pastor steps up to the pulpit to deliver a sermon crafted over the past seven days and sees too many empty pews.
The staff at Arts Place spends months reviewing potential performers at Hall-Moser Theatre, books an act, promotes it, then looks out on the big night to see too many seats vacant.
The staff at John Jay Center for Learning or the Jay County Chamber of Commerce or the Purdue Extension Office puts together programs that are both enlightening and educational only to see sparse attendance.
So what gives?
If you have the answer to that question, you’ll be rich in a heartbeat.
Communities all over America struggle when it comes to overcoming the inertia at the end of the workday.
Some blame the workday itself. Folks work hard. They’re pooped at the end of the day. The notion of going out to a concert or a ball game or a revival or a lecture or a seminar sounds like too much work.
The couch beckons. The remote control is picked up. And the next thing you know, the evening is gone.
You probably can’t remember what you watched on the boob tube. You may have fallen asleep on the couch. (I do. Just ask my wife.)
But the one thing you didn’t do is interact with your fellow human beings, those folks who are your neighbors, the ones who make up the rest of the community.
And, let’s face it, that’s sad. And it’s unfortunate. And, I believe, it’s actually a threat to the civic fabric that holds our country together.
Years ago — okay, lots of years ago — I remember my father telling me something.
I’d been at some sort of church youth group gathering. I was about 13 or 14 and about as socially clumsy as you can imagine any 13- or 14-year-old.
For reasons that had more to do with shyness and self-consciousness than anything else, I’d stayed on the sidelines of some activity. I have no idea why.
But I’ll never forget the words my dad spoke to me later.
They sounded stupid at the time. (That’s usually the case when you are a teenager and listening to your father.) But they made sense later.
He said this: “Life’s more fun if you participate.”
The funny thing is, I listened to him.
Sure, I immediately got defensive and resentful and everything else a 14-year-old does.
But I got over it and I got his point: Why waste time standing at the edge of activity when you could engage with that activity?
In some ways, it took just as much emotional, mental and physical energy to stand on the sidelines as it did to participate.
So why not participate? As my father said, life’s more fun that way.
And there is a bigger dividend to be considered.
When you participate — when you decide to get off the couch and go to that ball game, concert, revival, dance, seminar, ballroom dancing class, music lesson, poetry reading — you make your own community stronger.
How do you measure the health of a community? By the participation of its members.
Show up, take part, become engaged, be willing to make a fool of yourself now and then, connect with your neighbors, and not only will you benefit but the community will benefit as well.
OK, I’ll admit, a lot of this sounds corny.
But I sincerely believe it’s one of the biggest challenges facing our country in the 21st century. Community — real community, not the virtual kind with all of its degrees of interpersonal detachment — is at risk.
So my suggestion is a little one: Resolve this year to engage more with your community. Go to a ball game, go to a concert, go to church, go to a PTO meeting.
Get off the couch. Log off the Internet.
Dad had it right: “Life’s more fun if you participate.”[[In-content Ad]]