Communities

A teacher once told a group of children that the desserts for their meal were hidden around the park. The children searched together, found them together, and divided them up — and when asked why no one had hunted alone in hopes of a bigger share, one child answered: how can we all be happy when one of us is sad? It is a simple story, and it carries the truth this chapter is built on: for as long as others are suffering, it tarnishes one’s own happiness — the interconnection of Chapter One, stated by a child holding dessert. Communities organized around what people love rather than where the jobs were: the fishing town, the skiing town, the racing town, the town of horses — so that a person can pass their life surrounded by the thing that makes them feel most alive, among others who feel the same. One could be a farmer and never fear the crop: the work chosen for its meaning, with survival no longer riding on the harvest. And specialization of communities, like specialization of people, multiplies what exists to be traded between them.

And one built place is owed to the path itself. Stage one of this book assumed a reader with a book in hand; many of the people who most need the path are not readers holding books — they are people who are simply lost: the life stalled, the direction gone, the skills for living never taught by anyone. Today, a lost person often has exactly one door open to them, and it is the churches’ — communities genuinely willing to take them in, and happy, too often, to trade the shelter for the belief while the person is at their most vulnerable. The framework should build the other door: retreats — part community center, part counseling, part school for the skills of living — organized around the path of self-improvement the way the towns above are organized around their loves. Not clinics: rehabilitation, incarceration, and mental-health care are the government’s work, built in Part IV, and the retreats are none of them. Not monasteries, and no cult: no belief is the price of the door, because Chapter Three’s rule reaches here too — a person not free to leave was never helped. Just the place a person goes when they do not know where to go: guidance without ownership, community without conversion, the path offered the way this whole book offers it — taken freely, at any pace, or not at all. A retreat succeeds when the person no longer needs it, which is the one success no institution that profits from its members can ever want.