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DARE TO BE DIFFERENT

Wednesday, October 7, 2020
 
 
In my quest for understanding, I’ve found most people avoid confronting sensitive issues or reluctant to acknowledge that they disagree with their friend or speaking-up about having vastly different views from colleagues, bosses, or customers.
 
It isn’t about facts or viewpoints, is it?
 
It’s about willingness to be of a different viewpoint from someone and still want to be their friend, or telling someone they are nut-bars about some issue and telling them so without causing a skirmish or calling them certifiable …
 
Our access to knowledge is vast, and our independence is fierce, intolerant of opposing views, sometimes.
 
Not always, but very few smart people are sitting on their mouths on the sidelines unaccounted for or not heard from.
 
We seem divided, diametrically opposed parts of society, countries, and politics instead of ‘articulate and tolerant in our differing views,’ but that’s unclear.
 
Yesterday I discussed issues with two like-minded people, and by that, I mean people I see as ‘largely like-minded with me,’ yet I found those discussions demonstrated to me they were very far apart from each other. That leaves me in the middle, sort of, neither entirely agreeable nor downright cranky with either of them, but now better understanding those differing viewpoints. There is no point saying, “poppycock” mid-conversation with someone we care to have another conversation with – because chances are, we don’t know them well enough to be that flippant.
 
You see, it’s because people aren’t wrong in their views, they’re just different perspectives, not acquiesced out of ignorance, but instead spawned out of their knowledge, their experience, and their willful blindness to some other views. That probably describes most of us on any given day on any subject near to our hearts or far away from our familiar turf …
 
It’s not that we are 100% different on everything, and it’s not 100% the same on everything.
 
It’s a mix.
 
Lively discussion, tolerance for smart people with different views.
 
I think, sometimes …
 
We too quickly take for granted our tolerance of other views without having dug very deep, and because so many of our casual social relationships function on superficial surface levels. I believe we all want greater depth, but we fear friendship’s loss if we are disagreeable, if we dig too hard or speak inflexibly …


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