Column: Summer is a time for depth

As a person who has spent the bulk of my almost 21 years of existence within the city limits of Chapel Hill, it might be tempting to believe I know everything I’ll ever need to about this area.

This is a sentiment I’ve sometimes noticed among friends approaching the end of their time at UNC, but it’s especially an idea I often heard expressed by people I went to high school with just before we graduated.

At times, it has been a notion I have entertained as well. It’s easy to fall into a routine, to feel too busy to imagine the lives that unfold beyond the sights of our familiar routes.

But in reality, it was a ridiculous thought. It’s impossible to know and understand the lives of every person even in a small town, and Chapel Hill is no longer a small town.

It’s a big town, and it’s getting bigger.

But summers in Chapel Hill feel different.

There are plenty of reasons I love Chapel Hill in the summer — near-daily YoPo trips, warm nights, outdoor music, pickup basketball with old friends — but it’s the town’s temporary contraction in size and slowdown in pace that infatuate me.

In the summer, everyone seems in less of a hurry and more willing to talk. Chapel Hill feels more like the town of my childhood — a place where people have time to tell stories.

I think it’s this quality, more than any other, that attracted me to pursue the Summer Editor position at The Daily Tar Heel.

A newspaper is a fantastic place to work because, if you’re doing your job well, it is a supremely humbling experience. It exposes you to people and perspectives that live outside of your neat routines.

Your job is to investigate and relay the stories of those people — and to do it as fairly, accurately, empathetically and completely as possible. This is a tremendous opportunity and responsibility.

Often, the most important stories are the ones that are most difficult to tell, ones that are deliberately hidden away because they challenge our complacency and make us uncomfortable.

Chapel Hill’s unhurried summer nature does not mean that we will be able to capture every nuance of all those stories in this community, but it gives us a chance to slow down and look more closely at the stories we do tell.

We will make mistakes this summer, and we could even miss stories that urgently need telling if we are not careful.

Nonetheless, my staff and I are going to throw ourselves into our mission as best we can — the task of telling the most important, most human stories of this community. We are students who are learning the ins and outs of this profession, and we will need help if we’re going to do this well.

Students, come work with us. We’ll have the time to teach you, and you’ll have the time to learn.

And everybody else, talk to us. We want to know your story, and we’ll have more time to tell it the way it deserves.