Difference is all there is. There is no such thing as same. That’s the curious thing. All this clubbiness, all this we/they super-construction in our rituals and rites, all this being-an-exclusive-member-of drive we learn as we grow up – none of it is real. Inside every group there is so much difference we would drown trying to slosh through it all. So we pretend. Here is your medallion. Now you are one of us. We are all the same. Thank goodness.

Seeing people as people and not as the assumptions about their identities that society branded into our child brains is exhausting. No wonder we sit down after we say hello.

If I become interested in your view, I will have to adopt your values, and so I will stop being me; I will be an inferior person.

We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.

I am not like you. I am just like you.

How can both be true at once? They just can. They just are. Life is like that: maddeningly and mercifully paradoxical. In fact, nested inside this paradox is another one: we are the same, but difference is all there is. We are different inside our sameness. The strong and deadly pull, though, is to think we see difference in our humanity when all we are seeing is difference in our experience. When we give in to this societal pull to dehumanize, we pull away from each other, judging, condemning, ostracizing. This we can stop.