Valuing difference is a big job. It takes more than a department or a sermon or a march to embed it. We live in cultures; and cultures resist difference. They are set up to draw a circle around sameness and close it with a secret handshake.

We need to adore difference so that we can all finally, in fact, be the same in the only sense that matters: as human beings. And what magnificence that sameness is.

So how about we walk across the road and listen? And soon ask to be listened to, too. And promise never to interrupt. Only to learn. And eventually to respect?

And then, who knows?

To love?

To think afresh about an issue by listening with interest to an extreme opposing view feels, therefore, like risking personal annihilation. This assumption of ‘core difference’ is nothing less than the fear of ceasing to be.

We, therefore, become afraid to hear the other person’s thoughts because to consider them would be, we feel, to betray our deepest selves. So we make sure that no idea can develop in either of us that does not fit our certainty of who we are and who they are. We stop them. We interrupt.

Sometimes this difference is not even substantive. Sometimes it is a shift internally that the listener cannot see, but the thinker can feel. Sometimes it is a new emotional relationship with the thought.

So I have become impressed by those thinker-‘repetition’ moments, now understanding that, yes, it matters what the thinker says, but it matters more what happens for them because they say it.