I can tell you within 10 seconds of meeting you whether you’re someone I want to spend more time with.

Don’t be too impressed. You can do it too, and according to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, you do it all the time. We all do – make instant judgments – based on how people smell, pheremones, whether a person reminds you of someone you love (favourite cousin, best friend from childhood) or hate (the mean girl from high school, that regrettable love affair)…

What we think are our reasons for these snap decisions are actually the brain’s rationalizations, after the fact, that kick in to justify those initial instant reactions that arose from deep in our ancient brains.

This year, I’ve asked more than 20 people in our community to take us on a tour of this part of the world and share a week through their eyes. The hyper local filter, I guess you could say.

For the most part, I’d known them all, kind of. Enough to hit up via email or facebook or at the park. I tried to go beyond my friendship circle and ask people who seemed to represent the range of our community.

Know what? I didn’t discover a single person I didn’t want to be friends with.

Funny, hey?

20 people I barely know, who my 10 second brain might have eliminated for being too different from me, I have now fallen in love with (not to freak out my husband, or any of our guestagrammers, or any stalker-wary potential guestagrammers, let’s strike that) become very fond of. It took an average of 12 photos… although typically I was enchanted after the first one.

Imagine if, instead of giving someone a split second, we gave them 10 minutes, a conversation, a week, the benefit of the doubt, the space we ourselves would like… Imagine how much more love there would be in this world, in this neighbourhood?

Shall we do it?

Photos by Nic MacPhee.