A Stone for Jonathan.

Getting back to you...two papers later,

Your comment that there is an implicit agreement in virtual communities that rely on trust as essential for developing community seems spot on to me.  Connectivity may link individuals, but it does not re-create those essential feelings of belonging to a community or self-identifying with it.  The important thing about trust of course is that it is earned through behavior—yours and mine.  It takes time.  And a lot of good will.  People build community.  People self-monitor each other, more or less.  Trust gets broken.  People learn to play nice.  Or not.  The power of the "troll" label holds some sway.  They can be deleted and banned.

On balance, the challenge of community is as Yeats says, "to lessen the solitude without destroying the peace."  So community is an opportunity to explore yourself.   If I'm going to join in a community, I have to be willing to be accountable for myself.  That's the hard part for me.  I don't always want to spend the time.  Knowing myself is where the work comes in.  The idea of exploring and developing self-knowledge is as old as years, but I fear we are being handicapped by constant connectivity.  So I work against the current and advocate time for quiet reflection, for reading.  A good read is a perfect handshake—a moment of meeting—not bone crushing—and certainly not limp—more a smile in your eye.

Self-Exploration

My older son, who is about to graduate college, has had very little rest.  He has worked every break in five different states to craft his resume.  But at the beginning of this process, he recognized the need to be selective and take work where he could explore his interests.  He recognized the need to choose.  And that takes a lot of self-knowledge.  He is a big reader and recently finished a diplomat adventure yarn, Eastern Approaches that has inspired his decision to go on an adventure this Spring Break.

In the spirit of self-exploration, I sent him an American Scholar article, “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz, addressed to West Point Plebes.  It's about self-knowledge developed from focused concentration. Here is an excerpt that you may appreciate:

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube...

You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself togetherinto a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way...

“Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.” Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself...

I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.