I am happy to say I have never hosted (nor attended) a gathering in which anyone had need to return to their skin. (The first-most-important is the first 16 bars.) Muyanga says that “this is where the composer must have, once and for all, justified the first notes sung and played by the ensemble and where the conductor needs to push the entire alternate universe-the one that has recently been magically conjured up-over the edge of the abyss, leaving the listener to fall back into their own skin.” Parker tells the story of musician Neo Muyanga saying the last four pages of the score is the “second-most-important” part of the opera. How we close our gatherings is one of the most important parts of the entire event.

But she notes that there can be an element of reentry “even in the most ordinary comings-together.” No matter how commonplace the gathering, she says, “if you have forged a group and created something of a temporary alternative world, then you should also think about helping those you gathered ‘take the set down’ and walk back to their other worlds.” Reentry, in the context used by Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering, is more typically experienced after an “intense experience within the bubble of a dialogue” or for “soldiers returning from war or prisoners finishing their sentences” it is often a reflection of the challenges of ending an experience together where a group has bonded, particularly when removed from their ordinary surroundings. Of course, I could easily have asked the counselor for this detail before departing from camp, if I’d been willing to admit I wanted it. At the end of one week of summer camp as a junior higher, I was so beside myself at having had to say goodbye to a particular counselor that I spent the next several weeks writing letters to my relatives who lived in nearby towns, hoping they might be able to find me an address for the person in their phone books. And then there are those gatherings that a person might wish would go on and on. Plenty of people are still having a nice time, but I am done. There are gatherings that seem like they will never end, those at which I find myself sitting in a corner with my legs crossed, checking my watch, then crossing my legs the other way.

Priya parker the art of gathering