Differing

“Every aspect of tragedy must be the bones 

supporting the rest of life, 

What I cling to… is the belief that difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.”

                                                                                  Florida Scott-Maxwell (84)

                                                                                       FromThe Measure Of My Days (published in1968)

Differing can be so problematic that it holds a lot of evolutionary potential. 

I’ve experienced, and promoted, a lot of hurt, because of confused assumptions, misunderstandings, and wrong judgements. The hurting caused by these insensitivities seems to define us as human beings. It seems that we humans don’t respond well to differences. Almost all of our wars, that have ravished us throughout our history, have to do with being different from one another. My own experience of relationship pain has been mostly about how we differ. So, I’ve come to see this as a particularly difficult and high potential phenomena for attention.

I have believed that this was an issue, that with enough attention, one outgrew. Elders seem to be particularly gifted when it comes to differing (see page 93 of The Evolving Elder). Now I see it another way. I think this is an issue that is an evolutionary driver. In other words, I don’t think it has a once and for all solution. It is something that requires one to live with tension. One can go too far, one way, towards intolerance of all differences, and the other way, towards obliviousness, and ignorance of important differences. The goal is to get comfortable enough, to be capable of holding difference long enough, to recognize them, and ferret out their true benefits.

I think about the journey that diversity and difference has set me upon. I am an average white male, born American in 1948. When I think of the distance in tolerance between me and my grandfather, a Klansman, I can’t help thinking about Star Trek. I’ve been beamed into the future. I am more accepting of differences than he could have ever been, and I’m still learning so much about how they manifest. I’m not exactly color-blind, but I’m a whole lot more comfortable with issues of race, religion, or gender. Because of my age and disabilities, the prejudices I’m most familiar with, have to do with disability prejudice, and its other form, ageism. Thanks to my relationships I’m also learning about personal differences, which manifest more as differences in awareness, reality, and beliefs.

Differing now seems to me an important and edgy enterprise. Our uniqueness, and gift to each other, depends upon it, and our sense of belonging and connection, challenges it. And each of us gets to live within the uncertainty that differing generates. Holding on to yourself, and letting go at the appropriate moments, caring for another, it’s all so complicated. There isn’t a final solution, or even a resting awareness, there is only a deep and humblingly educative engagement. Humans fall down, people get hurt, whether you do grapple with differing or not. I certainly have fallen prey to both sides of differing: hurting and hurt.

Our ancestors never got to contend with this issue much. They tended to live in enclaves of alikeness, what I now call communities of affinity. We can’t take them as models. Our well-being, culturally and personally, depends upon us learning how to embrace differences without giving up our own. The Earth, and all of its children, are depending on us to learn how to differ well.

Differing is one of the places where I have most to learn.