Community

When I was a kid, community was always a blind spot for me. I was never a part of a large friend group, a sports team, or a youth group. I didn't ever stay at the same school long enough to put down roots. My oldest friend and friend group today is from high school.



So it's a little strange that I'm only now discovering this enormous part of human existence that is community.



(Actually, this is untrue. When I worked at a small company in SF in 2017, I stumbled into a community. My life was better for it, but I attributed this to the individual connections I made and not the shared experience we had of being part of the same group.)



Today, I dipped my toes into a new community in the form of SGI. I was welcomed like a member of the family. I made a friend who is in his sixties and a grandfather, another who left his life behind in Thailand to pursue the Silicon Valley dream, and another who is like the sister I never had.



And now I know that, if I so choose, wherever I end up on this planet, I have this community behind me. They are in 192 countries, all the major cities, and crucially, each member's philosophy towards life aligns perfectly with my own.