Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

On deployment in Kabul, I encountered the Afghan proverb that says, “A river is made drop by drop.” It must have been inspired by the Amu Darya on the Tajikistan border, but of course I pictured instead the St. Joseph, as it coursed by my house in South Bend some seven thousand miles away. It is usually invoked at the outset of a big undertaking that requires countless individual steps. But it also captures the importance of working at the local level as part of building a better nation: tearing down obstacles to a good everyday life in a single community, knowing how the small adds up to the great. I’ve learned that great families, great cities, and even great nations are built through attention to the everyday. That lesson, once I began to understand it, proved to be the unexpected and consistent theme of two decades’ education and work. Seeking wisdom and purpose at the age of eighteen, I rushed to escape the hometown that had shaped me. Then, slowly and imperceptibly, like one of those muted winter sunrises over South Bend, a pattern became visible across all I’d learned in philosophy and literature, business and service, politics and love. At last there is now enough light to see that the meaning I sought was to be found very close to where I had begun, on a path that proved in my case to be the shortest way home.