By: Dee Ellmann
Here is an example of One Day closer to home in Nashville which will be the first city where the movement takes place. Nashville singer and songwriter Gretchen Peters writes about the volunteer spirit and altruism that make Nashville a special place to live. Remembering the catastrophic floods of 2010, she writes:
Ten years later, these tornadoes have brought those memories all back. This time, perhaps because of Nashville’s booming popularity (we residents are ready to turn over our “it city” status to whoever wants it, by the way), the world reached out with love and concern. But no one was waiting around for outside assistance. A friend of mine, volunteering to help with the cleanup downtown, overheard someone say, “Thank you for inviting me to help you.” He told me it was the most Nashville thing he’d ever heard, and I have to agree. Of course, people are quietly doing good, selfless, empathetic deeds everywhere you go. But there is something about this city; something that lives in the music that ties us together; something that runs in the river that usually bends lazily around the Grand Ole Opry but once every 1,000 years rises up to remind us that we are a part of this land, not apart from it; something that emerged from the rubble on Madison Street in Germantown and Five Points in East Nashville—a kind of stubborn love of place that finds us at our strongest and best when we’re at our weakest and lowest.
From “What the Tornadoes in Nashville Revealed.” by Gretchen Peters. The Atlantic. March 6, 2020
Magical Bridge Playgrounds, Kindness Diaries, Narrative 4 and the power of stories, and Nashville Tennessee’s “volunteer spirit” all represent what happens when we come together to prove that we can put ourselves in the place of another and that there is a certain magical transformation that takes place when we do this that benefits us all.
