It's a big week. The 250th anniversary is finally here. Wishing you all a Happy Independence Day. I hope you've got some festivities planned and get to make the most of the country's milestone with friends and family.

Last time I checked in was ahead of the June gathering. We had a great turnout. 10 guys showed up, and from the feedback I heard, everyone had a good time.

I'm going to keep hosting these. It's a great outlet for us to build community in person with people who share our values and think similarly. Even here in Philadelphia, a metro area of about 6 million, in the city where the nation was founded, it still shocks me how hard it can be to find those people. That's exactly why I started this.

My goal is to keep growing our circle intentionally, and I'll ask for your help doing it. Please share this with anyone you know who'd want to join us later this month. A few descriptors that come to mind: entrepreneurship, freedom, sovereignty, agency, faith, community.

We're returning to Jasper's Backyard in Conshohocken for our July gathering.

Save the date: Wednesday, July 15th at 6pm.

Like I said, we had a nice turnout at the last one, and a few of you have been on me to get this next one scheduled (thank you). If you know someone in the area who fits the description above, bring them along.

And if you're planning to join us, reply to this email or shoot me a text so I can get a headcount. Please do this, it makes my life easier.

For the past several months, albeit on and off, I've been writing this section as a slow walk toward one weekend. Paine handing people the courage to leave. The taverns where they argued about it. Franklin half-dead on a frozen lake and going anyway. Adams sketching out what we'd build instead. All of it pointing here, to the first days of July, 1776, a few miles from where most of you are reading this.

We remember the Fourth. But the men in that room thought the day that mattered was the second.

On July 1st, Congress met at the Pennsylvania State House, Independence Hall now, to finally decide it. It was not a sure thing. John Dickinson, a Pennsylvanian, stood up and argued against breaking from Britain, and he argued well. The colonies were split. Delaware was deadlocked, its two delegates in the room canceling each other out. The one man who could break the tie, Caesar Rodney, wasn't even there. He was home in Dover, roughly eighty miles south. So he got on a horse.

Rodney rode through the night and a summer thunderstorm, sick with the cancer that would eventually kill him, to break his colony's tie. He walked into the State House on July 2nd still in his mud-spattered riding boots and spurs, and he voted for independence. Twelve colonies said yes. It was done.

The next day, John Adams sat down and wrote to his wife Abigail that the second of July, 1776, "will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America." He predicted we'd celebrate it forever "with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations." He had the whole picture right. He just had the date wrong by two days, because it took until July 4th to adopt the final wording of the thing, and that's the date they printed at the top.

Here's the part I keep sitting with. At the bottom of that document, the men who signed it pledged "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." That wasn't just words. Signing was treason. If it had gone the other way, and for years it looked like it would, those were the names the Crown had on paper. They had families, farms, businesses, reputations, everything to lose, and they wrote their names down anyway.

The thread that runs through this whole year of writing is the same one I keep coming back to: they didn't wait for permission, and they weren't waiting for the situation to resolve. They put their names down and got to work on something they might not live to see finished. Two hundred and fifty years later, most of us are afraid to take a stand for what we believe, let alone risk our lives. That's the part worth reflecting on over the weekend. Not just gratitude for what they did, but an honest look at whether we're actually acting on what we think is right, or hiding in the comfort of the crowd.

Jackson

If you're staying local this weekend, here are a few Independence Day celebrations worth considering:

If you haven’t done so already, please reply to this email and let me know the following:

What part of the Philadelphia area are you in?
What are your favorite local spots — restaurants, farms, trails, taverns?
What would make this community useful to you?

I want to build the most valuable community, your input matters a lot.

Sound Life Philly is in its early stages, and your help growing it matters more now than it ever will later. If this resonated, forward it to someone in the Philadelphia area who should be part of this newsletter and community.

Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe below.