It reflects the experience we all have every day. We interrupt. And we are

interrupted. We may be inured to its ravaging because it is just the way life has become. But each time it happens, we wince. Often we rage. It registers.

Delusion takes some doing to undo.

First, we need really to get that interrupting is a violent act. To begin with, we need to understand what interruption is. We have to recognize all of its

pernicious and artful forms.

And then we have to examine it at a ‘cellular’ level. We have to see the untrue assumptions that drive it, take them apart and start over with true ones.

Keeping the promise of no interruption is a tough job.

Tough because this promise is an unspiralling galaxy of a thing.

We do need to accept that the power of persuasion at its worst lies in its design to interrupt. It is supposed to interrupt us, our independent, cogent, thinking selves. And it does.

All four systems cause interruption. But polarization is also directly caused by it. And so to stop it, we have simply (although, of course, not easily) to eliminate the cause: we agree not to interrupt. If we can do that, we will not polarize. We will disagree. Even deeply. We may fight. Even fiercely. But we will not disconnect. And if we don’t disconnect, we will keep thinking.

Discipline produces freedom, nearly always. And this act of attention does exactly that. It restores respect where derision had moved in and begun to rot the premises. It liberates.