We recognize the difference between being a citizen and being a consumer. The difference between subject and object. Citizens have the capacity to create for themselves whatever they require. Citizens have power, customers have needs.
How many times have we brought in an outsider to tell us what we already knew?
To be committed means you are willing to make a promise with no exception of return.
Every parent’s deepest wish is that their children are self sufficient, happy, and able to live a full life.
Structure influences behavior. Design spaces that make you feel “you are welcome here and that you came to the right place.”
As long as we wish for safety, we will have difficulty pursuing what matters.
Questions draw us together. Answers push us apart.
Change from the top down happens at the will and whim of those below.
The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?
Invitation is not only a step in bringing people together, it is also a fundamental way of being in a community. It manifests the willingness to live in a collaborative way. This means that a future can be created without having to force or sell it or barter for it. When we believe that barter or subtle coercion is necessary, we are operating out of a context of scarcity and self-interest, the core currencies of the economist.
The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems like we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.
Maybe the unvarnished meaning of growing up is the acceptance that living out our values, and also winning the approval of those who have power over us, is an unfulfillable longing.
We decide to move far enough to the edge of the culture to see it clearly. What is the norm and normal does not serve us well. Many of us have tried hard to live a “normal” life, and how is it going?
We change the world when we create the time and space for heartfelt, unique conversations that discuss values and affirm doubts, feelings, and intuition.
Understand that the task is to shift the demand for the right answer to the search for the right question.
Acting on what matters means that we will consistently find ourselves feeling like we are living on the margin of our institutions and our culture. This calls for some detachment from the mainstream.
The things that matter to us are measured by depth. Would you assess your humanity by its pace? When I view myself as a time-sensitive product, valued for what I produce, then I have made depth, extended thought, and the inward journey marginal indulgences.
What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought we incidental. An afterthought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before. If the artist is one who captures the nuance of experience, then this is whom each of us must become.
Questions that are designed to change other people are the wrong questions. Wrong, not because they don’t matter or are based on ill intent, but because they reinforce the problem-solving model. They are questions that are the cause of the very thing we are trying to shift: the fragmented and retributive nature of our communities.
We want desperately to take uncertainty out of the future. But when we take uncertainty out, it is no longer the future. It is the present projected forward. Nothing new can come from the desire for a predictable tomorrow. The only way to make tomorrow predictable is to make it just like today. In fact, what distinguishes the future is its unpredictability and mystery.