No Solitude, No Community

There’s a saying: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.

The same is true of community. People often lament its decline without recognizing that community is a tree that takes many years to grow. The absence we feel today has been decades in the making, and rebuilding it will take decades too.

Community doesn’t appear by magic. It’s not given by the government, nor created overnight by co-working spaces and networking salons, most of which will soon disappear. Our culture of disposability has taught us to mistake pop-ups and parties for community. But community is not merely a matter of design. It also depends on the character of the people building it.

The Buddha named four qualities necessary for community to flourish. People must practice generosity rather than mere transaction. They need a culture of nonviolent communication. They need discernment about what people genuinely need rather than merely want. And they need consistency.

Just as importantly, he said, in the absence of these qualities, a wise person must be willing to be alone. The image he gave is of a wild elephant in solitude. Elephants are deeply communal creatures, yet they also spend much of their lives alone. Modern people often get trapped in the middle: not fully connected, yet never truly alone.

Ride any subway in New York and you will see cars filled with ads for AI “companions” and AI “friends.” Yes, these products are pushed by corporations. But there would be no market for them if we felt capable of being alone while patiently nurturing the roots of community.

No solitude, no community. The path is as much about leaving spaces that don’t feel right as it is about creating new ones. If you’re lonely, you need more than contact. You need faith that you can plant a tree, nurture it in solitude, and one day sit in its shade.