During my first regional convention, I heard the words “No man is an island!” While we chanted loud enough to vibrate the windows and were proud enough to intimidate an army, I didn’t agree with those words, “No man is an island.”

In those moments of chanting, most of us aren’t thinking about philosophy or John Donne or metaphors about human connection.

We’re mostly thinking about the beat of the chant, the energy, the way our voices stack on top of each other until it doesn’t sound like a hundred teens anymore.

Still, when the noise fades and the night gets quiet, perhaps after Havdalah, when the last bit of spice finally disappears, or in the dark of a cabin when only your bunkmate’s reading light is still on, you start thinking about what that line actually means.

You start wondering why we yell it at all.

We say “no man is an island” like being an island is the worst thing you could be.

Like the whole point of the Grand Order is to make sure nobody stands alone.

But I think there’s something missing in that interpretation.

Because islands aren’t empty.

If you’ll be so gracious, I’d like you to think about the last island you saw. It could be on a postcard, maybe on your phone wallpaper, or on a brochure for Hawaii.

Islands have personality.

Each one holds a world of its own.

And so do we.

If every person is an island, then each of us brings our own terrain to this organization. We do so with our histories, our insecurities, our talents, our fears about making friends in a room full of strangers, etc.

We bring the things we’re proud of, and the things we hope no one notices.

We bring the parts of ourselves that are sunny, and the parts shaped by storms.

That doesn’t make us isolated.

It makes us interesting.

And here’s the thing people forget: islands rarely exist alone.

Most of the time, they come in groups, clusters of land rising out of the same ocean, shaped by the same forces, close enough that you could hop from one to the next if you knew the way.

The term for a cluster of islands is an archipelago.

And honestly? That feels like a better metaphor for BBYO than anything we shout during cheers.

Because this isn’t about forcing everyone into one identical continent.

It’s not about pretending we’re the same or smoothing out our edges so we all fit into some perfect leadership mold.

It’s about showing up as ourselves, those uneven, evolving islands, and realizing that the people around us aren’t far-off continents either.

And suddenly those islands didn’t feel so far away.

Suddenly, you had an archipelago.

And the thing about an archipelago is that it’s more beautiful than any single island could ever be alone.

Not because any one island is lacking, but because together they make a landscape, something bigger, something richer, something that only exists when each piece stands proudly on its own and still reaches for the others anyway. That’s what BBYO is.

It’s a chain of islands with each person bringing their own shape, their own story, their own storms and sun, and choosing, over and over again, to drift closer.

So the next time an Aleph shouts “No man is an island!” and the room answers back like a tidal wave, think of it differently.

Think of it as a reminder that yes, maybe we are islands, but we’re islands that belong to something bigger.

We’re part of an archipelago of people who hold each other up, who build bridges, who make the map larger and more intricate every time someone new arrives.

Because no man is an island.

But all of us, together?

We’re an archipelago.