Several days ago, I read a line that just nailed me.

Growing up, writes Fr. Richard Rohr, is “not about being privately correct; it’s about being fully connected.”

Pema Chödrön, in “The Journey Goes Down, Not Up,” makes the point even more clearly: the problem with the metaphor of climbing a mountain to enlightenment, she says, is that even if it were possible to achieve private transcendence, “[others’] suffering continues, unrelieved by our personal escape.”

It’s good to be correct, and of course it feels better to be correct than not.

But is being correct by yourself much good to anyone in the end?

I’ve leaned on a few in the past several days, and it’s sort of miraculous how they can cheer successes and cushion the inevitable falls.

Another friend called me last night to tell me that a friend of ours had died over the weekend. “It was like spin the bottle,” he said. Three, maybe four months start to finish. No one knew the bottle was spinning, and nothing could be done when it stopped.

Among many others, Molly gave me the gift of horses, and I found myself re-reading an article I’d read and shared with her several months after a sudden move back east, out of the riding life I’d just as suddenly come to love.

Here’s what Sterry Butcher has to say about horses and what they have to teach us about learning to ride and to live:

Learning to ride takes time. It’s about love and letting go, accepting the what-ifs and understanding that events beyond your power are simply that — beyond your power. I’m still learning. What’s important with horses turns out to be what’s important in life. You give your heart knowing there will be risk. You go fast anyway. You get back on anyway and laugh anyway. You go forward with whatever brilliance and clarity you can muster. … The earth is there to catch and hold us when we fall.

I’m still learning, too. Especially about the giving and the risking and the going fast and the falling and the getting back on and laughing anyway.

Molly’s passing is, of course, beyond my power. But I’m so grateful for what she taught me, and for the friends who’ve caught and taught me since.

In the past few days, I’ve had a couple of experiences with building and working with groups at unusual speed and depth.

This begs the question: is it possible to form and perform better in groups? And, if it is possible, how can we set ourselves up for success?

Unsurprisingly, the key ingredient seems to be trust. The more trust that’s built, and the sooner, the better groups tend to work.

And that leads to a question about group formation: how can we go about identifying, inviting, and enrolling the right people so that we have high trust without groupthink?

I don’t have a single coherent answer yet, but the principles seem to have to do with people, projects, and processes: who’s involved, what they’re working on, and how they work with each other.

In many ways, that boils down to good leadership: both of selves and of the group. Everyone has to be open and competent enough to be a potential fit, and someone has take responsibility for the group’s overall way of relating and working.

Well-selected, well-facilitated groups are much more effective — and fun — than the other kind.

How can you build toward that? How might you build on success?

I’ve been reading a lot about uncertainty lately.

Seth Godin. Pema Chödrön. Kevin Kelly.

Pema puts it best: the way of the warrior is to choose ever more uncertainty.

Of course, as a Buddhist nun, she doesn’t mean the kind of warrior that kills people. But the image is important: for, as Kevin writes in New Rules for the New Economy, the constant change (“flux”) of the network economy can feel like violence.

And that’s the thing about our culture, isn’t it? Violence is begetting violence. Uncertainty is begetting uncertainty.

That certainly doesn’t excuse the violence, and anesthetics are not necessarily the right answer. But it’s hard to think of a healing process that doesn’t start with a move toward uncertainty — and, in uncertainty, some kind of understanding.

“If you want to go far, go in a group.”

And if you want to go in a group, get the group dynamic right early.

It’s a lot easier to have the important conversations before there’s real money and pressure and expectation on the line than when you’re in the thick of things.

It’s not hard to find an article or argument for moving to a low- or no-growth economy as an ecological imperative.

And, lately, it hasn’t been too hard to find people making the case that aging populations, the goods-to-services shift, or the law of diminishing returns (or something else) is imposing some kind of cap on developed-world growth, especially outside the United States.

What I’m not seeing a lot of, however, is intelligent discussion about wealth creation or transfer in a low- or no-growth world. Millennials and Gen Z might be all about reforming capitalism or reducing/reversing emissions, but it’s a lot easier to walk out of school on Fridays today than to contemplate retirement after the compounded effects of the Great Recession, the demise of the traditional career (and its safety net), and decades of low or no growth.

We’re pretty far outside my zone of competence here, but I think we need to be thinking quite a bit further down the road than we seem to be.

Somehow, we’re going to have to make both life and the planet livable into the next century. And that’s probably going to require much bigger tradeoffs than a Friday-afternoon walkout.

Critical mass happens after enough people are interested. Once you’ve got that, the reaction is self-sustaining.

But any reaction has to start before it can sustain.

And for that, you need what John Paul Lederach calls “critical yeast” (aka Derek Sivers’s “first followers.”)

Find those people. Treasure them. Feed and nurture them.

They might not look like much at first, but your long-term vision won’t look like much till they get going.

Is free — giving work away without charging for it — a generous act?

The short and unsurprising answer is, of course, that it depends.

The longer answer is a tension between a desire to be generous and a need to be professional.

Lots of people I know want to be generous, and will frequently give things away. But there comes a point at which they recognize that they can’t give everything away — and that leads to the complicated question of what to charge for and what to give away.

Free can indeed be generous, but professionals also know when, why, and how much to charge. It’s worth learning how to be both.

Sometimes, it doesn’t look like much at all.

Sometimes, it might look like standing still or going backwards.

And then, all of a sudden, something happens.

Intentions, as a friend pointed out, are often in tension.

Can work be playful?

Can you live uprightly, yet not uptightly?

Can you manage yourself effectively enough to make the most of independence?

Examples abound … find a couple and play with them for a while.