What We Must Do

from “Living Life Well”

This article first appeared in The Kenwood Press June 1st, 2026.

My high school band teacher, Mr. Knight, warned us that we must “woodshed” every day. He meant building the discipline to take our instruments out to the woodshed to practice, beyond rehearsals, and beyond supervision. Practice is discipline, and discipline is a form of discipleship — believing in something so deeply that it becomes a part of you.

When a concert pianist sits at the piano, his two hands come together to produce music because they are disciplined to respond as one, neither one more important than the other. His two hands each accept their role, left and right, and coordinate rather than compete — not getting in the way of one another. Each is distinct, and neither controls the other. This is also true of good governance, where people believe in what they can do, together.

Last month, I wrote about the critical mass rapidly forming between the irresistible force of the people and the immovable object of the current administration, and the cognitive dissonance that has crept into our government over the past decade — if not longer. We are approaching a point that calls not for further polarization, but for a paradigm shift: a movement toward wholeness grounded in a unified field of mutually respectful and responsible diversity. In Jungian terms, this is the union of opposites.

Imagine a wheel, the hub at the center reaching out toward the rim through radiating spokes. When the wheel is well‑made, when each spoke has appropriate tension, the wheel turns true. It does not wobble. It has integrity. So it is with good governance. The center represents leadership, and the rim — where the rubber hits the road — represents the people in all their diversity; the spokes are the agencies and institutions that connect the two. A functioning society depends upon the responsibility each part has to another, which affects the integrity of the whole structure. If anything is untrue, the entire wheel falters and fails.

There is, however, a certain danger of polarity within this arrangement. Power concentrated too heavily at the center risks hardening into autocracy, while power dispersed toward the rim risks dissolving into fragmentation — each part acting without regard for the whole. At one extreme lies dictatorship, where the center serves only itself. At the other lies a kind of collective incoherence where, as Yeats wrote, “…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”

Last month I wrote about the collapse of the Qing dynasty in China, when the imperial center gave way, and with it the fragile coherence that had held together a vast, complex society. In its absence emerged a patchwork of regional warlords and competing claimants to authority, each with its own army, its own ambitions, and its own tenuous claim to legitimacy. The wheel still carried tremendous energy at the rim — local governments, militias, revolutionary movements — but there was no stable hub to hold it together. Ordinary people bore the cost of that fragmentation in famine, displacement, and chronic insecurities.

And yet their story did not end there. Out of that prolonged incoherence, another extreme took shape: a new center, hardened into ideology and embodied in a single dominant authority. Under Mao, the revolutionary promise of liberation gave way to the consolidation of a party‑state firmly fixed at the hub. The pendulum had swung — from a wheel without a center to one in which the center claimed total authority. In either such case, the wheel runs untrue. It wobbles, veering between disintegration and domination, and it is the people who bear the strain.

China is in the news today, but these extremes are not unique to Chinese history; they are enduring tendencies in human affairs. The fear of tyranny can breed instability, and instability can, in turn, invite tyranny. The task is not to abolish this polarity but to hold it in balance — to maintain a wheel that turns true. Which brings us to what must now be done.

As I have said, many believe we are approaching a kind of critical mass, as irresistible forces within our government contend with immovable objects — and some fear political collapse. Response, in such a moment, must be both principled and practical, grounded in vision and integrity. It must seek not only to correct what has grown corrupt, but to restore the conditions under which a just and stable order can take root again.

We must first recognize what has happened, through a Commission of Truth and Reconciliation such as the one in South Africa at the end of apartheid. Without a shared and public reckoning with what has taken place, there can be no durable future. Truth is the necessary foundation. It must be sought with rigor and spoken with clarity, so that a common reality can be established from which rebuilding may begin.

Then there must be accountability. A functioning society cannot tolerate corruption, and there must be consequences for abuses of power. A tribunal grounded in the principles of Restorative Justice — vigorous, fair, and transparent — must examine the offenses that have brought us to our present situation. There must be reconciliation, but also reparation; where ill‑gotten gains have been taken, they must be returned. If justice is to mean anything, it must be visible, and real.

Finally, and most challenging, there must be structural renewal. A formal review and repair of the system — something akin to a constitutional convention — may be required to re-establish the rule of law and reconstruct the foundations of governance itself. The three branches — executive, legislative, and judicial — must be re-evaluated in light of present realities rather than in terms of nostalgic assumptions. And what have come to be known as the Fourth and Fifth Estates — the press and social media — must be made responsible to the facts, and to their readers. Their influence is profound, so their accountability must be commensurate.

None of these steps can succeed without the first: the discipline of woodshedding. Unless each one of us is committed to truth, and to practicing restraint and thoughtful action, any reform will be superficial and short‑lived. The outer structure depends upon the inner condition. What we must do right now is simple and demanding: we must prepare ourselves. We must practice, practice, practice, so that when the moment comes we are able to act. Then we will become like the musicians of an orchestra, and whatever instrument we each play will find its place in one grand performance.