Summary Of Scott Peck's The Different Drum

Scott Peck, author of The Different Drum: Community and Making Peace, describes community as "people living together in both freedom and love." Communities cannot be formed around people (individualists) who are busy satisfying their own needs first and who are not willing to work hard to make love work. Upon entering this class I realized that a community is not an automatic thing. It does not just appear out of thin air. A group must work together to build bonds between each other. The community in which we are trying to build upon is compiled of many different types of people varying in age, race, sex, class, career, etc. It is going to take some time to build the trust, communication, freedom, and love that we need to form a community. Peck explains the word "community" as something that we tend to overuse without ever truly understanding it; almost making it meaningless. We have a tendency to relate ourselves to our neighbors, without having ever actually talked to them. I recently moved into a rental house close to school. I have been living there a few months and have only so much as spoken to one of my neighbors. This one neighbor, coincidentally, happens to be my landlord. While geographically this is an area where many people and I have
things in common (the same street, trash men, taxes, etc.); it is not anything close to a "community". It lacks the communication, the freedom, and the love. While reading Scott Peck's book, I began to greatly relate to his first sense of community at Friends Seminary.
I was raised Quaker and attended Wrightstown Friends Meeting in Pennsylvania until I eventually moved to North Carolina to attend school. I would rate the community at my Meeting as one of the closest knit groups I have ever been apart of. It is a community in which I miss dearly and hope to expand to North Carolina. The Friends that attended the Meeting were of a very diverse mix of people who complimented each other perfectly. A quote from Peck that seems to fit exactly how I felt in this community is "I was utterly free to be me." I was able to find freedom and love in this
community. I feel that one day, hopefully by the end of this semester, we will build a community within this class that will be as enjoyable as the one I left in Pennsylvania. I do, however, feel that in order to move toward becoming a closer community there are a few things I would like to add to the class. I feel that small groups would help me to begin to form bonds with people as individuals. These bonds can then blossom into greater bonds with more people as we change groups on a regular basis. It is also imperative to meet back up at the end of each small group session to regroup as a whole. I have had difficulty being heard in the large group setting and feel that as we form one on one bonds with each other it will become easier. The better the communication, the easier it will be to move toward freedom and love.