A Scout is Friendly

Probably all of you know some guy who is grouchy all the time. His neighbors try to be nice to him, but he just won't be friendly. Maybe he'll build a great wall around his house to keep people away.

Let me tell you about another kind of neighbor I heard about. There was no wall around his property, and somebody noticed that a strip of grass between his yard and his neighbor's yard was unusually green. How come? He was asked.

"Oh," he laughed," my neighbor and I are so afraid we'll cheat each other that we always water and fertilize the grass across the line on the other fellows side. That strip of grass down the property line gets twice as much water and fertilizer as the rest of our yards." Instead of a fence to keep each other away, that man and his neighbor had a vivid green reminder that they were friends.

The point of this story is that if you want to have friends, you can't build walls between yourselves and other people. Instead, cultivate that space between you by being as fair to the other guy as you'd like him to be to you. A Scout is friendly, and the way to have friends - and keep them - is to be friendly yourself.