The other day, someone asked me about the cover of Sounding the Drum.  The drum on the cover, as in the title, is my way of honouring M Scott Peck MD who wrote The Different Drum, the book that introduced me to community building.  It also represents the earliest form of long-distance communication, a tribal precursor to our digitally-connected world.

We all need a tribe.

We are born into a tribe and we yearn for these connections because they are familiar to us – family-like.  Today, when most of us do not have a tribe we are dealing with a global loneliness epidemic.  No coincidence there.

Trish Becker-Hafnor talks about this in her TEDx Talk.  She says that often new mothers are lonely.  An article in Psychology Today reports that “30 percent of Millennials (ages 23-38) always or often feel lonely”.  Poor millennial parents who fall into both categories!

We need to consciously build tribes today; they don’t exist naturally as they did in the past when families lived nearby.  As this article shows, there are scientific benefits to raising children near their grandparents.

We need our tribes through all the cycles of life if we are to lead full and happy lives.

This is possible even if our families do not live near, because we can build tribes.  We can build Communities.

It is time for all of us to sound our drums.

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash