The cover story relates to the Character Hub which we’ve recently launched, and many thanks to all who participated in that by offering comments and filling out the questionnaire. It’s easy to say, though I believe it’s true, that the experience of the past year has brought character development forward in both good and bad ways. It’s demonstrated the values of grit, generosity, and resilience. Conversely, it’s foregrounded the idea that those characteristics aren’t things you have and hold, but things that you work on, day after day, year after year. That they only exist insofar as we’re able to constantly renew them.

It’s also underscored the idea that we don’t work on those traits alone. In the cover story, I quote New York Times columnist and camp alumnus David Brooks where he says character “is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong,” but arises as a consequence of the relationships we have with others. “If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments … [to] surrender to a community or a cause, … lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you.”

I’ve returned to that idea so many times over the past year. That who we are is a product of our commitments, a product of the attachments we have with others. That the daily acts we took yesterday don’t count for today. Rather, we need to keep doing it.

Camp does many things, though that’s ultimately what it does best—providing those kinds of lessons, that kind of practice—which is something I’ve highlighted in a number of the pieces in the guide. It’s a message that we don’t communicate enough.

This camp year, or so it seems at this moment, won’t be a return to normal in all the ways we imagine normal to be. It will continue to challenge us. But it will also continue to remind us that camp is the attachments we share with each other, and wherever we are, it will call us to lose ourselves in the daily act of serving each other, and particularly of serving children and youth. If there’s a theme to the guide, or a theme for the year ahead, I think that’s it.

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