It’s Time

It’s Time

“You aren’t broken…the culture is.”
~Johann Hari, Lost Connections

I just finished reading Johann Hari’s latest book Lost Connections and I’m still reeling from it! This book is so relevant to our times. Lost Connections builds one of the strongest cases for community building that I’ve read yet. I could include dozens of beautiful quotes from the book here, but I don’t want to spoil the book for you or risk taking them out of context.

You may remember that I featured Johann’s TED Talk about addiction here. He also wrote Chasing the Scream, the book that was the basis for this TED Talk.

In our culture, we suffer for want of community and that’s such a shame because we can build community. We don’t have to be alone, to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders alone!

Have you heard the Parable of the Long Spoons? It’s an allegory of heaven and hell. There are two rooms. In one room there is a group of people sitting around a pot of mouth-watering stew but they are starving because their spoons are too long to reach their mouths. In another room, the people with the too-long spoons are all enjoying the stew because they are feeding one another. What a small difference between what constitutes heaven and hell.

We need to take care of one another, not only by sharing our food but also our kindness, our empathy, our presence, and our compassion. We need to stop waiting for a crisis to build us into community and start building community ourselves, now.

It’s so simple when you know how. Sounding the Drum shows you how.

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About The Author


I have always loved writing and community building. I’ve written a book about healing and happiness, The Happy Place, as well as a Community Building book, Sounding the Drum: Community Building in the Digital Age,both available at any Amazon store. I’ve been through life changes that I thought were the end of my world, but I’m still here. You never know what will happen next. Isn’t that what makes life interesting?