Just like each of us (yes, you, too) should be required to play baseball or softball as a teenager, here’s another mandate I’m putting in place when I become king:

Mandatory living (i.e., service time) in each of urban, suburban, and rural communities.

Between the ages of 25 and 40 (assuming you make it that far), you will live in a community within each type of housing zone. That’s five years in each, baby.

I’ll be very generous with the implementation — you know, because this is a free country, after all, and you are free, sentient human beings.Β And I’m a benevolent dictator.

You are free to choose the order. You are free to choose the geography (don’t worry, we’ll tell you which communities qualify for which label). You are also free to move around within those communities or from one geography to another.

The only other rule is that your service time must be accumulated contiguously — i.e., you must live in each for five years in a row. 

I can see only one other way to avoid this mandate.

That’s if each of us can find the generosity and empathy to realize that geography and community add to our personal history. And our personal history informs the story we tell ourselves. And the story we tell ourselves becomes the lens through which we see the world.

Our story doesn’t make us dumb or smart. It just makes us us.

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