It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” —Marcus Aurelius

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy, but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

Whether men had seen battle or not, each of them, to one degree or another, came home from wherever it is men go to be with themselves or to do the things they would never admit to out loud, with the same intent to inflict whatever harms they endured from the world onto the women and children closest to them. Relation didn’t matter. Mother, wife, sister, and daughter were all equally targeted for the same rage. Father, husband, brother, and son all had the same blank disregard in their eyes—there, behind the glistening fury, was the thing that shook them so thoroughly that they felt the need to destroy anything and anyone who they believed could see it: nothing.

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.

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?