community and contemplation

The world needs our collective commitment to community. It needs us to see value in relationships. The world needs our personal commitments to contemplation. It needs us to take responsibility for our thoughts.

As it is, our days are more rife with disconnection and distraction than community and contemplation.

Here’s the thing: Behind the impulse to disconnect there is something wise. There is a clarity there, a noticing of the limit of our capacity to carry the weight of the world. But what if, rather than disconnecting into loneliness and division, we would follow that impulse instead toward collaboration? toward community?

And here’s the other thing: The distractions that run rampant through our lives are more the result of an atrophied imagination than they are indicative of our moral apathy. We aren’t bad. We’re just out of practice. What if there is a way to take the stuff that drives us to distraction and channel that into playful practices of contemplation that build the muscle we need as a culture to give flesh to our moral ambition?

That would be wild.