net.au · 6 hours ago

How a Rapidly Growing Town Is Fighting Social Isolation – Using the Ocean - Abc News

When yoga teacher Jo Halley posted on a community page inviting strangers to wade into the dark, cold ocean at 7am, she had no grand plan - just a simple impulse to share something that felt good. What grew from those first seven shivering people became, for hundreds in the rapidly expanding coastal town of Torquay, Australia, a lifeline against the quiet epidemic of loneliness. Seventy-five-year-old Keri Jones, still new to town when her daughter Shaan died suddenly last year, returned to the Wednesday Ocean Waders just two days after the loss, saying "I just needed to feel the water surrounding me, washing over me" - and the group held a circle of remembrance on the beach, laying flowers in the sand and folding their arms around her. The story quietly suggests that community rarely arrives by design; it tends to begin with someone willing to show up, and the courage of others to follow. "You know there's always someone there to support you now, no matter what's going on in your life," Jo says - which turns out to be not a small thing, but perhaps the whole thing.