Word travels fast at Cairn. Whether you’ve recently started a relationship or have recently ended one. Whether you’ve written a funny tweet or have been the most recent person to have had a “corrective conversation” with Dean Sherf, odds are people that you have never met or talked to know about it. People often complain about this aspect of community life at Cairn. In short, people talk about other people’s business. Students sometimes go as far as to say that they want to leave Cairn because people gossip. This is the exact place that they lose me. To those of us who have had similar complaints, I have two questions. How often do you do it? Where on earth are you going to find a place where people do not gossip? I have worked in several different capacities for Christian organizations and secular organizations. I have yet to be employed in an organization in which employees have appropriately respected other peoples personal lives. If you have, please contact me immediately because I would love to be employed by them. From rock gyms to bakeries to On The Way to the Highlander Cafe to the Cafeteria to retail to sales to camp counseling to volunteer work, people gossip and I do too. It is not good. It is not helpful. It is certainly practiced everywhere.

Following the theme of my last article, my question for all Cairn students is: What will you do about it? If you have the capacity to notice a problem, you have begun the steps to changing the problem. Do not stop at merely identifying problems. All of the hard work lies after identification and that usually means that people wish to go no further than pointing out that there is a problem. Here are a few practical tips to being part of the change in more healthy and helpful conversation that concerns other people. First, be “straight-up” in your personal life. If you are bothered by something someone has done to you, talk to them about it. The more conflict that you leave unaddressed, the less helpful it is for those involved because the offender does not know that there is a problem; the offended’s feelings of being wronged can quickly turn into resentment and lead to gossip if not dealt with. Secondly, when you hear news about someone else at the school be careful how you interact with both the information and the person who is telling you these things. If you find yourself disrespecting someone or sharing personal information about someone, truly consider what you are doing to the other person. If someone in your circle seems to talk about others’ personal lives often with you, the likelihood that they are having the same conversations about you with others is high. Finally, for those of us who think that the grass is greener elsewhere and that somehow you can avoid things like this by simply changing your context, consider this wisdom “wherever you go, you must take yourself with you.”