Recently my WoW friends and I decided to start a new guild. We're really excited about all the interesting things we plan to do together, we've thought of new ways to recruit people, and naturally we think we're starting something pretty special. But there's one thing that makes me feel prouder and happier about this than I have been before, something my new guild leader pointed out: that this guild, no matter how great it is, is just dust in the wind.

In fact, we realized all guilds are basically temporary arrangements of diverse people for certain purposes; they grow, change, and dissolve even as the people in them grow and adapt to new situations. A lot of people become upset by guild changes, especially if they're trying to lead and lots of drama ensues. They know in their head of course that no guild will last forever, that WoW itself will not last forever, but they still become sad when, eventually, things fall apart.

My friends and I are discovering that there's no need for this sadness. A great guild, you could say, is like a Buddhist Mandala: an impermanent gathering of individual grains of sand, destined to live its time and then get brushed away. Most of my friends come from a guild that had served us well and gotten old with us, and leaving it behind just felt like the right thing to do. Someday our new guild will get old and we'll leave it behind to do other things -- and that's okay. The purpose of a guild is not to reign eternal, just to let us do what we want to do together now, and enjoy every minute of the present.