Everybody needs a little direction in this life

A woman walked into my house Thursday morning. Through the unlocked, but closed, back door. She stood in my back room, at the door to my kitchen, knocked on a window, and as I approached her, she waved, asking, "Is this three-twenty-one?"
"No," I told her, in a voice I hoped contained my shock at and disapproval of her boldness. "This is three-fourteen."

"Oh, I'm sorry." She continued to stand there. In my house. "I looked at the numbers," she said. "I thought they said three-twenty-one. I'm delivering a table."
I just shook my head, not sure what else to offer. I don't know my neighbors' house numbers, and I didn't want to unwittingly invite her into someone else's home. And I couldn't spot a delivery truck nearby, so I was a little hesitant.
Earlier in the week, we'd propped our front door open so my husband and a neighbor could carry a couch out - the neighbor was taking it to his place. As they stood contemplating the most efficient angle at which to attempt this maneuver, the man's two dogs bounded through my front door.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love dogs. I've lived without them for a while and was kind of energized to have a couple romping through my living room.
My toothless orange cat, however, was less amused. He arched his back, bared his utterly unthreatening gums, and took slow, deliberate steps toward the playful dogs. They retreated. The funny thing about the scene to me was the absolute uninvolvement of the dogs' owner at removing them from my house.

I've known since moving to Ottawa four years ago that this is a different sort of place than the town I grew up in, a suburb where neighbors speak in driveways or over fences but the boundaries are strict and clear.
I've told myself that Ottawa's sort of "friendliness" is charming - an assumption of innocence and intimacy that allows people access to, well, one another, the sort they wouldn't assume anywhere else. But the two encroachments into what I consider my personal space really fore fronted another thought for me this week: no place is really just my own.
I mean, I could board up my windows and doors, but eventually something would come crashing through. There is no small world, not even my own home, where I can isolate myself from the questions and concerns, or even just the knocks and muddy paw prints, of the larger world.

If nothing else, choosing to live in a college environment drives that reality home. Students, staff, and faculty share physical space, resources, ideas, visions; we share hopes and disappointments, curiosities and passions, fears and those moments when we overcome them.
We've signed on to this together. We've committed to seeing each other through.

And if this place does its work, then we not only open up to each other, here, but to all that lies beyond these doors as well. To people who have gotten turned around and are in need of direction, like the woman with the table. To people whose complicated lives travel everywhere with them, like the man with the dogs. And then to the people whose realities almost never intrude on mine - people who, as I crawl under my covers to sleep at night, are crawling under a bridge somewhere.
People who, as I read Salman Rushdie to prepare for class, are ashamed to admit to their children that they never had the opportunity to learn to read. You and I have committed ourselves to this place, have determined to pursue an education. Such a commitment compels us to greet the world that comes through our doors with openness and respect. It requires us to do our own stepping out also, to do our own crashing into unfamiliar worlds.
To not be afraid of questions, or of bringing our complicated lives alongside us.
Perhaps this is how we learn: by ridding ourselves of the false divisions that we imagine in suburban life, and imagining the universe as a small Kansas town.