What a day spent seeing Belton from the sidewalk, the lake and the air taught me about understanding a community
You can live in a place for years and still know most of it from about five feet off the ground.
We experience our cities through windshields. We know the road to work, the storefront we pass every morning, the intersection we complain about and the building that seems to have been sitting empty forever.
Last week, the opening day of Leadership Belton’s Class of 2027 gave me the opportunity to look at Belton from several very different perspectives.
We started where most of us experience a community every day: at street level.
Walking downtown forces you to notice things that disappear through a windshield.
Buildings stop being scenery. Empty spaces become questions. Historical markers become stories. Businesses you have passed dozens of times suddenly have people, systems and decisions behind them.
At one point, we passed a downtown property that has generated some frustration because little appears to be happening with it.
My immediate reaction was not that somebody needed to be blamed.
It was that I wanted to know why.
What does the property owner believe the obstacle is? What does the city believe the obstacle is? Are those actually the same problem? Is the issue money, regulation, timing, infrastructure, expectations or something else entirely?
I don’t know the answer.
That may be the more important point.
It is remarkably easy to diagnose a community from a distance. An empty building becomes an unmotivated owner. A delayed project becomes government incompetence. A struggling business becomes poor management.
Sometimes one of those explanations may even be correct.
But leadership probably requires asking another question before becoming too attached to the first answer.
Our route through downtown included stops at places including Sly Fox, Grapplers Lair, Nolan Creek Brewery, Blackbird Books & Spirits and Hell Yeah. The value was less in receiving a tour of local businesses than in seeing several very different organizations from the other side of the counter.
At Grapplers Lair, much of the conversation centered on confidence, discipline and learning to function when circumstances become difficult.
There is a reason martial arts, military training, emergency services and plenty of other demanding professions rely so heavily on repetition. Confidence under pressure is rarely something a person simply summons when the moment arrives.
It is usually built beforehand.
You practice. You deliberately enter situations where you are uncomfortable. You fail when failure is relatively safe. You discover that you can recover. Eventually, something that once produced panic becomes familiar enough to manage.
At Nolan Creek Brewery, that lesson took a completely different form.
We went surprisingly far into the science of making beer: measurements, timing, chemistry, repetition and the precision necessary to reproduce the same product consistently.
The customer sees the finished glass.
They experience the food, service, atmosphere and people around them.
Behind that experience is an operating system they will probably never see.
That thought stuck with me because it applies to far more than brewing.
A patient sees a paramedic making a decision, not the years of training and repetition behind it.
A reader sees an article, not the sourcing, records requests, verification, editing and arguments that happened before publication.
A customer sees the polished product, not the processes required to make it appear reliably.
Good organizations often make difficult things look ordinary.
Blackbird Books & Spirits offered another perspective.
It functions as what is often described as a “third place”: somewhere outside home and work where people can spend time around other people without every interaction being purely transactional.
The books matter. The drinks matter. But so do the chairs, events, atmosphere and hundreds of decisions about what kind of space its owners want to create.
A small bookstore cannot stock every book. A restaurant cannot appeal equally to every customer. A publication cannot cover every story.
Choosing what belongs also means deciding what does not.
That is part of creating an identity.
Community, in other words, is not built only in council chambers.
Sometimes it is built over coffee, over a beer, on a training mat or around a bookshelf.
At Hell Yeah, our conversation turned toward opportunities and the importance of recognizing the limits of your own knowledge.
“Know what you don’t know” sounds simple enough.
Actually doing it is considerably harder.
It requires enough confidence to make a decision while retaining enough intellectual humility to recognize that somebody else in the room may understand part of the problem better than you do.
Later in the day, the perspective turned inward.
Before the program began, we completed the VIA Character Strengths assessment, and during lunch we looked at the results collectively.
The report describes character strengths not as measures of talent or ability, but as indicators of what people care about and naturally bring into their work.
As a group, honesty appeared most frequently among our top strengths, followed by gratitude and humor. Fairness, spirituality and creativity were also strongly represented.
The more interesting part may have been what was missing.
Not one member of the cohort had perseverance, prudence, humility, self-regulation or zest listed among their top strengths. The report cautions that this does not mean those qualities are absent; strengths outside someone’s highest rankings can still be called upon when circumstances require them.
That distinction matters.
Over the coming months, our class will be responsible for completing community projects together. The group appears to have no shortage of honesty, creativity or ideas.
Perhaps generating possibilities will be easy.
Turning one into something finished may require more intentional effort.
Knowing a group’s blind spots may be every bit as valuable as knowing its strengths.
Then our perspective changed again.
Freedom Boat Club took us onto Lake Belton.
From the water, the community begins to look different.
Roads and storefronts recede. Geography becomes more obvious. The lake stops being merely somewhere to spend an afternoon and becomes infrastructure, recreation, natural resource, economic asset and part of the larger physical system around which the area has developed.
I already love being on the water, so putting me on a boat was not exactly a difficult sales pitch.
I may have spent part of the ride calculating whether I could justify a Freedom Boat Club membership.
That probably wasn’t part of the curriculum.
But the larger lesson remained.
Then we went higher.
Much higher.
We ended the day at the Temple airport, where, while waiting, I somehow ended up reading a TIME book about the history of air travel.
More specifically, I was reading about blimps.
This is apparently how I use downtime.
It was a strangely appropriate thing to be reading before getting into a helicopter.
I have spent plenty of time in helicopters as a flight medic, which creates a funny kind of familiarity. When aircraft become part of your job, it becomes remarkably easy to stop thinking about what is actually happening.
You climb in.
Strap down.
Put on the headset.
Go to work.
And somewhere along the way, you stop appreciating the mildly absurd fact that human beings figured out how to take several thousand pounds of machinery, spin a rotor over it and make the whole thing hover in the sky.
There was no patient in front of me this time.
No mission to focus on.
So I got to look out the window.
And for a few minutes I remembered how extraordinary flight actually is.
The perspective was extraordinary too.
From a helicopter, the things that dominate our attention on the ground become very small, very quickly.
Roads become arteries.
Neighborhoods become patterns.
Open land suddenly has context.
Distances that seem substantial behind the wheel shrink. Places normally experienced separately reveal their relationship to one another. Belton, Temple, the lake, major transportation routes, new development and undeveloped land become parts of the same picture rather than individual destinations.
Nothing on the ground had changed.
Only where I was looking from.
And perhaps that was the point of the entire day.
Leadership is usually discussed in terms of decisions: making them, communicating them, defending them and persuading people to follow them.
But there is a step that should probably come before all of that.
Change where you are standing.
Walk the street.
Talk to the property owner.
Talk to the city.
Ask the person who disagrees with you what they see that you do not.
Look behind the finished product.
Get on the water.
Go high enough to see how the pieces fit together.
Then come back down.
The danger is not that any one perspective is necessarily wrong.
The danger begins when we convince ourselves that it is complete.
One day into Leadership Belton, I am not sure I have any more answers about the community than I did when the day began.
I may have something more useful.