Indivisible
I admit I am a sucker for the Buddhist philosophy that we are all interconnected. It collides with my susceptibility to chaos physics, through which we learn that if a butterfly flaps his wings on one end of the world, it can affect the tides thousands of miles away. In other words, both the physical world and the spiritual world tell us we are interconnected, whether we like it or not. Even in chaos, there is patterning. So it is ridiculous to pick an echo chamber and live in it as though we were right and the others are wrong.
I was reminded of this when I decided to read my friend, Denise Hamilton's book, Indivisible.
Denise is a DEI expert and no matter how you feel about DEI you shouldn’t hold this against her. What she is saying is not what you have heard before. In fact I was angry that the book began to climb up the bestseller list in the DEI category, and then in the business category, because I wanted it to be in the self-help category or the personal development category where I think it belongs and can help the most people.
Here’s why. The principles Denise espouses can help you understand your spouse, or a disabled person, or your child. They have little to do with racism, classism, or all those other bullshit isms.
Denise has experience in a wide variety of fields that aren’t known for their surplus of black women. in fact. She has worked in that last bastion of white maleness, commercial real estate. IYKYK. She picked up a whole lot of experience before beginning her book, including the ability to see herself in someone else’s shoes, the practice she refers to as swapping nouns.
Swapping nouns is an unbelievable way to help yourself understand what makes people whose beliefs are different than yours, feel and act the way they do. Most Americans have given that up for comfortable echo chambers.
I am blessed by having grown up in New York and moved to Phoenix 50+ years ago.
When I arrived in Phoenix during the years of the John Birch society, I had no echo chamber even if I had wanted one. I absolutely had to do some homework and find out why people around me who seemed so nice believed so many things different from the things I believed. That was a huge-ass lesson.
I am not going to tell you that I became inclusive overnight. It’s been a lifelong practice to overlook differences in order to find similarities. And I never lost my own values. Denise’s book recalled to me how I found common cause with the many Christian white men who ran our city.
During this election season, I would like to suggest that some of you try to do the same thing. Talk to someone you don’t talk to on a regular basis. Find out who they REALLY are.
Two summers ago I rented a cabin in rural Strawberry Az for a month. Up there by myself in a community festooned with Trump 2024 banners and loose elk I found some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Clearly they don’t believe what I believe politically, but in everyday life they treat each other with kindness and compassion, equity and inclusion and they welcomed me knowing nothing about me.
They were so good to me that when one of them was taken ill and I was invited to an online prayer circle I said yes, despite the fact that I am an atheist, and I do not myself pray. I had to figure out how to do this. It opened a host of issues for me.
Fortunately, there is a practice in yoga called Metta. It’s a heart-centered practice in which you wish everyone “may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, may you live and love in peace.” You start with yourself and keep wishing until you have included the world. I used Metta practice to hope that the man next door with heart disease got his stents repaired and could come home.(he did).
That’s how I knew that when Hillary Clinton declared that Trump supporters were “a basket of deplorables,” she shouldn’t win the presidency. She didn’t deserve it.
Nobody can dismiss human beings as a basket of anything because we are all individuals. One of the best things we can do with our lives is explore where we share common values with other people who seem to be unbelievably different from ourselves. Start a conversation with someone who you are sure doesn’t believe the same things you do, and you will find out that in other ways, there are tremendous commonalities.
I’m taking Denise’s thesis from Indivisible out on the road during this campaign season. If you are a Democrat talk to a Republican, if you are a Republican, talk to a Democrat and if you are an independent talk to anyone who doesn’t seem to have anything in common with yourself. Don’t try to change their mind, just try to find out who they are. You’ll find out they are human beings and they are connected to us.
One of the blessings of having moved to Arizona 50 years ago as a libtard from New York was that I had to learn this lesson, and it was the best lesson I ever learned in my life.