The Art of Us

You have hundreds of contacts in your phone. You cannot think of one to call when something goes wrong. And you have quietly known, for years, that this is not what a full human life was supposed to feel like…



Let's be real here. You have done the work. You have accepted your life. You have become the version of yourself you wanted to become. You are learning to enjoy your ordinary Wednesdays. And you are still, on the honest evenings, tired in a way no self-work quite reaches, because the small warm thing you have been quietly missing was never something you were going to build alone…



You were built for a village. Modern life has not given you one. This book is about how to build one anyway, in the small warm ordinary ways that the wisest cultures on earth have been practicing for centuries!



The Southern Africans have known it for a thousand years. The Japanese have known it. The Swedes and the Spanish and the Greeks and the Irish have all known it, each in their own accent. What they know is that a life well lived is not built on a mountain by yourself. It is built around tables, in warm rooms, alongside the specific humans you show up for again and again, until the showing up itself becomes the shape of a good life.



The Art of Us gathers nine of the world's most profound philosophies of belonging into one small book, written for the modern reader who wants to come home to the community they have been missing!

Written for the tired professional, the isolated new parent, the recent transplant to a new city, and anybody else who has been silently building a real life without a real village, and is ready, finally, to build one on purpose…



Inside this book, you will discover:

• The Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu, which names the deepest truth of what it means to be a human being with other humans

• The Japanese art of Chowa, the small daily practice of tuning yourself to the room rather than trying to control it

• Four small daily rituals of gathering, the Swedish Fika, the Spanish Sobremesa, the Greek Parea, and the Irish Craic, each one a centuries-old practice for holding a community together

• Three inward practices that turn you into somebody others actually want to be around, from the Japanese Enryo to the Buddhist Metta to the deepest of them all

• The Buddhist practice of Mudita, the pure joy at another person's good fortune, which is the rarest and warmest quality any modern adult can develop!



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You will not need to move to a village, quit your job, or upend your life to bring these ideas into your ordinary week. You will only need the small willingness to try one of them, this week, with one of the specific humans already in your life.



The community you have been quietly missing is not somewhere else. It has been waiting, on your ordinary Wednesday, all along. This book is about how to walk into the room and finally find it!



Belonging was always the point.