Happy to Chat: Youville Place Benefits From Proximity to Lexington Community Center
Summary
On September 9, 2024, members of the Lexington Rotary Club celebrated the installation of a "Happy to Chat" Bench at the Lexington Community Center, which is located just steps away from Youville Place.
Members of the Lexington Rotary Club inaugurated the Lexington Community Center’s new “Happy to Chat” bench on September 9, 2024.
You’re out minding your own business on a crisp fall day, taking in the foliage that surrounds Youville Place, when you realize you’ve crossed into the friendly territory of the Lexington Community Center. You start to walk around the building on the curving sidewalk, when you spot a beautiful sight: under the shade of a pair of river birch trees, there’s an empty bench with your name on it!
In literal fact, your name is not on this bench. However, the bench does bear a written message: Happy to Chat. By sitting here, you are inviting other passersby to join you for a friendly conversation.
This bench was recently installed with funding from the Lexington Rotary Club. “One of our most important values at Rotary is to connect older adults to community,” says Yanira Burgos, President of the Lexington Rotary Club and Director of Marketing at Youville. “Our district governor is very supportive of these benches, which a few other rotary clubs have installed in their communities this summer. We were thrilled to be able to fund one so close to Youville Place.”
“Happy To Chat” benches have proliferated in communities across the country as part of a push to alleviate what public health officials are calling an epidemic of loneliness. According to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murphy, the effects of chronic loneliness are comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, putting lonely people at risk for heart disease and other serious cardiovascular problems.
Retirement, widowhood, decreased mobility and other age-related health problems are all factors that can make a person feel less connected. But it’s not just older adults – even the young and able-bodied are grappling with feelings of alienation in an age where it feels more normal to scroll through Instagram reels than it does to seek out a conversation partner.
A well-placed “Happy to Chat” bench has the potential to renormalize the art of striking up a conversation. A journalist named Annabel Abbs-Streets wrote in the Washington Post about her social experiments sitting at a “Happy to Chat” bench in London, where she discovered the unexpected joys of opening up to strangers. She found that after getting over initial awkwardness, opening up to strangers felt both natural and exhilarating. She cites Paul van Lange, a Dutch psychologist who labels the rush of well-being we get from connecting with strangers, “Vitamin S.” According to Abbs-Streets, “Talking to strangers is like an exercise – we need to practice it regularly or risk losing the muscle for it. This “mental fitness” is bolstered when our brains use infrequently activated neural networks to converse with strangers.”
It just happens that the Community Center’s “Happy to Chat” bench faces an outdoor exercise area. Next time you come across the exercise area, you might let it serve as a reminder to take a seat on the “Happy to Chat” bench and give your chatting muscles a workout.
