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.

I mention this because one’s chosen philosophy of human nature is vital. It determines where we focus. And our focus determines where we go.

I moved gradually to this action. I had watched the connections among my delegates and their connection to their learning dissolve as soon as the breaks began and the phones came out. After a few years I had become unwilling to foster this loss any more. And I realized I was willing to lose business if necessary in order to stop this infiltration of the platform system of interruption. I wanted to restore the full, attentive, undistracted human mind to every minute of our study and practice. I have lost no business.

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.

It worked. Nick said that the biggest change was immediate: there was less fear in the room. The promise of no interruption does exactly that: it defuses the fear. In its place, gradually, is safety. And from safety grows better thinking and clearer conveying of thought and feeling. And from that grows understanding, and from that the threat of polarization shrinks.