At a discussion I attended earlier this week, someone said that ritual can only be analog. It’s possible to share certain kinds of connections and experiences digitally, but ritual has to be enacted and experienced in person.

It’s the difference between watching a cooking show and making dinner night after night. Both can be shared experiences, but they’re categorically different.

As the speaker went on to point out, however, the magic of the Internet is that it allows us to find the others with whom we share real-life bonds. It’s never been easier to find and build community.

But what we think of as community seems to want to happen offline. There’s an important difference between being on the same discussion board as your people and being at the same conventions, sporting events, dinner tables, or whatever other physical spaces hold the bonding rituals by which we recognize each other.

Get out there and get connected by all means. But then do the real, meaningful, rewarding work of building community.

All of us hide — in different ways, at different times, in response to different triggers.

As I continue to dance between traditional classrooms and online workshops, I notice that workshops, with the semi-anonymity of online interactions, allow for both more and less hiding than classrooms. Some people leap right in. Others sit back, waiting for something to happen.

Yet it also seems that the behaviors and postures that are ingrained and incentivized in most traditional classrooms are look an awful lot like hiding when they show up in a workshop.

In most classrooms, we sit next to each other but work alone. The instruction flows from the teacher to the students. And the deal is that if you sit through the course and do OK on the test at the end, you’ll get credit for learning something.

In workshops, we change all of that: students sit alone but work together. There’s far more cross-talk than one-way instruction. And, since there’s no test at the end, what you learn is what you learn.

Not all schools teach hiding, and not all workshops draw people out. Yet it might be worth asking how well it serves us, in an age of near-total digital transparency, to spend the first two decades of our lives training to hide.

What we expect determines what we’ll accept.

It’s Boston, so the roads are bad.

Fixing the subway would take time and money, and it would be difficult, so we’ll keep up the duct tape maintenance plan.

Since these things are public goods, they couldn’t possibly be made right — so I guess we’ll just have to live with the potholed, rickety, rackety status quo.

Expectations like those let everyone off the hook. And, when you stop to think about it, they train us to accept shamefully poor services.

You wouldn’t accept that attitude from the people who make your car: we take it for granted that, every single year, they’ll produce a safer, more efficient model that’s less likely to break down.

Yet we expect and accept that the roads we drive on will get worse every year — or at least until or unless the pizza company takes matters into its own hands.

Let’s face it: that’s shameful. Isn’t it time we re-trained ourselves to expect better, and accept nothing less?

About a year ago, I received the remarkable gift of convening what Parker Palmer calls a clearness committee.

Confronting a major life decision — what to do next after earning the master’s degree I’d worked so hard for — I didn’t want to go it alone. I gathered a half-dozen friends who knew me differently well and asked for the gift of an hour of their combined attention.

It was an extraordinary experience, and it has continued to reverberate across the past year. Plenty of questions remain open, and much that I’ve done in the past year has raised new questions to wrestle with.

But one of the most powerful results wasn’t any specific decision but rather a new bias for action. In his closing reflection, one friend — a paratrooper — compared my situation to the 40-foot tower from which paratroopers in training have to leap before they can jump out of real airplanes. “Jump,” he urged. “Jump!”

Forty feet looks and feels like a big fall. But, if you want to make the really big leaps, you’ve got to throw yourself off the tower one way or another.

In the past year, I’ve made as many practice jumps as possible. The memory of that committee helps me get my courage up, and the feeling of flying keeps bringing its own kind of clarity.

Mark Twain is credited with saying that the two most important days in a person’s life are the day she’s born and the day she figures out why.

Birth is no minor miracle. But, as far as we know, everybody goes through it. It’s not really a choice; it’s just how we begin our journey through this life.

Being reborn, or freely and consciously choosing to live this life, or to lead the lives we live — now, there’s something to behold. Not just anybody manages that.

For me, that decision came 10 years ago. Having spent six or seven months crawling deeper and deeper into a cave, I reached a point at which I had to choose whether to keep going into the darkness or turn back toward the light.

I chose to turn back. And although I still can’t explain exactly how or why I made that decision or actually managed to re-emerge, I’m grateful that I did.

I arrived in the world, and I chose to stick around. And now I’m working on why.

Mostly, I’m just grateful to have a chance to keep living the questions.

Isn’t it interesting how the most desolate times often contain the greatest sense of possibility?

Once we finally admit that times are tough, we can decide what to do next.

And once we realize we can decide, progress becomes possible.

Not certain. Not easy. But possible.

In the past week or two, the Boston area has begun to emerge from another hibernation. Birds chirp. Buds are on the trees. And people are about as smiley as they get around here.

Marathon Monday was the season in microcosm: a fierce early thunderstorm gave way to sun by the time the last runners limped by after the pace car.

Standing along the route watching the last few hours of the pack go by, all I could think of was how I’d driven the same way they were running two or three times the night before, back and forth to the emergency room.

The marathon goes right past the hospital, so I’d passed barricades and other race paraphernalia on the way in and out of the parking lot throughout the night. And, some minutes after I saw the runners the next day, they would chug past the hospital, sweating their way toward the finish line about 10 miles ahead.

What a lesson in the fragility and indomitability of the human condition. Vision-impaired runners bravely complete marathons with their sighted guides. The occasional over-80 runner would go by, stooped but not stopping. And, meanwhile, who knows how many people had to spend the day in the hospital for some reason or other.

Time and chance happeneth to them all. Take an extra moment to appreciate the sunshine and the spring in your step.

Brother David Steindl-Rast says that we cannot be grateful for everything, but we can be grateful in every moment.

I was reminded of this over the weekend, in the midst of yet another scramble to respond to a medical emergency in the family.

I’m not grateful for the fact of the emergency, or the frequency with which these have occurred over the past six months or so.

But, once again, I bow in gratitude for an EMS system that works when we need it, for doctors and nurses who calmly and professionally put another Humpty together again, for neighbors who drop what they’re doing to jump into ambulances and gather at the hospital, for the gift of long unstructured hours with old friends.

And, most of all, I’m grateful that this one turned out OK.

Where to draw the line between personal and professional life is always an intricate dance.

But it’s so much easier when the people you work with put first things first.

How many organizations start meetings with a genuine check-in, accept a first-timer sharing some tough stuff, and immediately follow up with personal notes saying do what you have to — we’ve got your back.

I don’t know. But I wish everyone could be so lucky as to work with people like this, who share a culture and values like that.

Thanks, team.

When you’re needed, and you’re lucky enough to be able to get there, go.

Showing up really matters — especially when it matters most.