Holding Trustworthiness Together: On Community, Culture-Making, and the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Are Yearning For

When Ananda asked the Buddha if having good friends was half of the holy life, the Buddha corrected him: "Not so, Ananda. Having good friends, good companions, good comrades is the whole of the holy life." Not half. Not an important part. The whole.

This is not exaggeration or poetic flourish but a statement about how human beings actually become who they're capable of becoming. It is certainly true in my life. We don't develop trustworthiness in isolation, perfecting ourselves in some private monastery of the soul. We develop it in relationship, in the messy, difficult, beautiful practice of being with other people who are also trying to mean what they say and say what they mean.

Individual trustworthiness is the foundation, yes—the radical self-responsibility we must each claim for ourselves. But trustworthiness held alone can wither into rigidity, can become another form of isolated perfectionism, another way we separate ourselves from the whole while claiming to be working on ourselves. Real trustworthiness only comes alive in community, in the dynamic web of relationship where we test it, practice it, fail at it, and try again with others who witness our becoming and are witnessed in their own.

This is the crossroads where we find ourselves as a species: sure - we can continue down the path of the highly individuated ego, that myth of the isolated individual who needs no one, who optimizes and biohacks and self-helps their way to some imagined perfection - or we can remember that we are fundamentally relational beings, that the Lakota understanding of mitakuye oyasin isn't metaphor but reality, that we literally cannot exist separate from the web of all our relations.

This age of hyper-individuation has given us much—freedom from oppressive traditions, space to discover who we are beyond prescribed roles, tools for understanding our own psychology and healing our wounds. But it has also delivered tremendous fallout: epidemic loneliness, the commodification of relationship, communities fractured into millions of isolated selves all performing connection on screens while sitting alone in rooms, the exhausting project of the self that never ends because there's always something else to fix, to optimize, to perfect.

We've been sold a story that salvation lies in self-improvement, that if we could just heal our trauma, set better boundaries, manifest our desires, align our chakras, we would finally arrive at some state of completion. But the truth is simpler and more challenging: we become whole not by perfecting ourselves but by taking our imperfect, still-becoming selves and offering them in genuine relationship with others doing the same difficult work.

We are privileged people—many of us reading these words have the luxury of choice about how we want to live, what kind of culture we want to create together. This is not a small thing. While much of the world struggles for survival, we have the agency to ask:

What kind of world do we want to build?

What values do we want to uphold?

How do we want to treat each other?

This privilege comes with profound responsibility—the recognition that we have power to shape culture, and that power matters.

Culture is not something that happens to us. It's something we make together, every day, in every interaction, through the values we uphold and the behaviors we normalize. When we take radical responsibility, when we honor our word even when it costs us something, we create culture too—a culture of trustworthiness, of integrity, of genuine relationship.

The question is not whether we will create culture but what kind of culture we will create. And we create it together, through the accumulated choices we make about how to be with each other. Do we meet in that field Rumi speaks of, out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing? Or do we stay on our respective sides, lobbing judgment across the divide, certain of our rightness and their wrongness?

We are living in an age of sides, of us vs. them, of tribalism wearing the mask of righteousness, where people gather not to connect but to confirm their shared judgments of those who are not like them. Left and right, woke and anti-woke, spiritual and skeptical—we've fragmented into camps, each certain they hold truth while the others are deluded, dangerous, deplorable. This is not community. This is collective ego, the cult-of-the-self scaled up to group size, still fundamentally about defending position rather than opening to connection.

Real community happens in a different place entirely—not in the certainty of our positions but in the humility of the Great Mystery, in the recognition that none of us has all the answers, that control is an illusion, that something larger than our individual or collective understanding holds us all.

The Diné walk in hózhǫ́—beauty, balance, harmony—understanding their place in a sacred order they didn't create and cannot control. The Buddhist understanding of interdependence points to the same truth: we are not separate. The boundaries between self and other, between my well-being and yours, are convenient fictions that collapse under scrutiny.

When we lean into this mystery together, when we allow ourselves to not know, to be uncertain, to be wrong, to be corrected, to be changed by relationship rather than defended against it, something becomes possible that cannot exist in isolation or tribal certainty.

We create what the 12-step community calls a "we" program—not a collection of isolated "I"s working their individual programs side by side, but a genuine collective practice where our healing is bound up with each other's, where your sobriety matters to my sobriety, where we stay clean and sober together or we don't stay at all.

The 12-step tradition understands something profound about community and trustworthiness. The ninth step—making amends—is about relational restoration. You don't just feel sorry for breaking trust; you actively work to repair what you've broken, to restore integrity not just within yourself but between yourself and others. And you do this not when it's convenient or comfortable but when it's right, when it's necessary, when it's what integrity demands.

The tradition also teaches about staying in your own lane, about giving others the dignity of their own lives. This is radical self-responsibility in community—taking full ownership of your own experience while releasing the compulsion to control others, to fix them, to make them see what you see or do what you think they should do. It's recognizing that everyone is on their own path, having their own experience, learning their own lessons, and that your job is not to manage their journey but to walk your own with as much integrity as you can muster.

This is how we hold trustworthiness together: not by demanding it from others but by practicing it ourselves while creating space for others to practice it too. Not by policing each other's progress but by witnessing each other's struggles with compassion and honesty. Not by pretending we've arrived but by acknowledging we're all still becoming, all still learning, all still failing and trying again.

The values we uphold within this space matter immensely. We agree not to gossip about those who aren't present because we understand it erodes trust. We agree to take responsibility for our experience rather than blame others because we understand that blame makes us powerless. We agree to keep our word even when it's inconvenient because we understand that trustworthiness is built through consistency over time. We agree to speak the truth as we understand it, knowing we might be wrong, willing to be corrected, holding our positions lightly enough to be changed by what we learn from each other.

These values inspire and encourage and support each other toward becoming more trustworthy, more honest, more capable of genuine connection. Not through shame or judgment when we fail—because we will fail, repeatedly, inevitably—but through the steady presence of others who hold the possibility of our integrity even when we've temporarily lost touch with it ourselves. This is what community offers that isolation cannot: witnesses to our becoming, mirrors that reflect our potential back to us, companions who've walked similar paths and can say "yes, this is hard, and yes, you can do this, and yes, we'll walk it together."

Sometimes this requires confrontation—the loving kind that says "I see you betraying yourself and I care about you too much to pretend I don't notice."

Community that's real holds us accountable with love, calls us forward into our integrity, refuses to collude with our self-betrayal even when that collusion would be more comfortable for everyone.

This is the gift of genuine relationship: it won't let us hide, won't let us stay small, won't let us settle for less than we're capable of becoming. But this kind of confrontation is only possible in a container of genuine care, where people know you're not trying to control or diminish them but calling them toward their own highest potential. It requires skill and humility—the ability to name what you see without claiming to know the whole truth, to offer your perspective as gift rather than weapon, to leave space for the other person's experience to be different from your understanding of it.

Sometimes we need inspiring individuals around us to model this kind of integrity, people who've done their own work deeply enough that they can hold space for others without trying to fix or save them. Real humans who've walked through their own darkness and emerged with hard-won wisdom they're willing to share. People who can say "I've been where you are" and "here's what I learned" without insisting their path is the only path, their truth the only truth.

And sometimes, honestly, it takes deep heartache to bring us to this place of genuine community.

Sometimes we only change when staying the same becomes unbearable. The gift of desperation, the 12-step community calls it—that moment when you've tried everything else and nothing has worked and you finally, finally become willing to try something different. To admit you don't have all the answers. To ask for help. To surrender the illusion of control and lean into something larger than your isolated self.

This is the beginning of wisdom—the recognition that we are not meant to do this alone, that the myth of the self-sufficient individual is just that, a myth, and that real strength lies in allowing ourselves to be held by community, to be changed by relationship, to be vulnerable enough to need each other and honest enough to admit it.

This path is one that indigenous cultures have maintained against all odds, one that contemplative traditions have pointed toward for millennia, one that 12-step communities practice in church basements and community centers around the world: the path of genuine community, of trustworthiness held together, of culture created consciously through shared values and mutual accountability.

This path invites us to move beyond right and wrong, beyond tribalism and sides, beyond the comfortable certainty of our positions into the uncomfortable mystery of genuine connection.

This path asks us to acknowledge that we don't have all the answers, that we need each other, that your well-being and mine are not separate, that what I do to the web I do to myself, that what I bring to the web I offer to all.

So perhaps the question is not "how do we arrive?" but "how do we stay present to what's unfolding?" The Great Mystery doesn't reveal itself to those who demand certainty or control. It reveals itself in the spaces between us when we're willing to not know, when we can sit with the discomfort of our own incompleteness and meet each other there—imperfect, still-becoming, reaching across the gap with trembling hands.

So here I ask some direct questions of you, dear reader:

What if community isn't something we build but something we remember?

What if trustworthiness held together isn't a future achievement but a present practice, available in this moment, in this conversation, in this choice to show up honestly with another human being who is also trying to show up honestly?

What if the more beautiful world our hearts are yearning for (credit to Charles Eisenstein) isn't somewhere else, isn't waiting for us to become perfect enough to deserve it, but is here—nascent, fragile, possible—every time two people choose to meet each other in truth?

This is the radical nature of the Great Mystery: it doesn't wait for us to get it right. It holds us as we are—betrayers and betrayed, trustworthy and untrustworthy, trying and failing and trying again. And in that holding, if we can stay present to it, something shifts. Not because we've perfected ourselves but because we've finally stopped trying to perfect ourselves long enough to notice we're already part of something larger, already held, already home.

The work, then, is to risk being the one who shows up, who keeps their word, who refuses to participate in the degradation of relationship, even when—especially when—others are not doing the same. And to do this with something closer to playfulness, to curiosity, to wonder at what becomes possible when we stop defending and start discovering.

What if the person you're certain is untrustworthy is actually just terrified? What if the community you're waiting to find is waiting for you to show up as you actually are rather than as you think you should be? What if the culture we want to create begins the moment we stop waiting for it to happen to us and we begin to simply start practicing the values we want to live by?

I'd love to hear from your lived experience. Please share in the comments.