This note is an invitation to stop calling people out and invite people in.
We live in an era of great division and unprecedented polarization.
- Democrats vs. Republicans
- White People vs. People of Color
- Men vs. Women
Partisanship and extreme anger push us:
- to accuse.
- to expose.
- to shame.
- to bully.
- to call out.
I have been guilty of this behavior and I really want to be intentional in refraining myself to engage in it any further. My dear friend Tayo Rockson wrote earlier this year about the lost art of nuance and this concept resonated so deeply.
Our highly curated social media channels strengthen our beliefs instead of challenging them. The Facebook algorithm blind sides us and separates us. Where we should build communities and engage in fruitful conversations to find common grounds, we insult, we shame, we point fingers.
- We remove people from our lives.
- We get comfortable inside our micro cosmos.
I totally respect and support the legitimate anger and the urgent need to #resist vigorously all forms of oppressions. Some beliefs, policies and values seem so outrageous that we fail to comprehend one another.
At the same time we should be proactively looking for bridges and reach over to:
- the ones that hold different beliefs than us.
- the ones that we cannot understand.
- the ones that hurt.
Hurt people hurt people.
We tend to forget that we are all multi-dimensional beings.
On the quest of enlightenment, we are all at different stages. Our role is to the shed light on each other’s path, not to fire our flashlights of knowledge in the eyes of our “counterparts”.
We should stop trying to “outwoke” one another.
We should stop holding on to labels that make us comfortable.
We should all making an introspective efforts to expose our own unconscious biases.
Healing comes with empathy, compassion and conversations.
Let go of the need to be right.
There are too many walls but not enough bridges.Stop calling people out and invite people in.
“Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.” Jiddu Krishnamurti
I love you.
I highly recommend you to watch the following lecture. Tayo Rockson offers incredible insight on embracing identity and communicating across cultures. He also explores the role of fostering global understanding. The goal to this lecture is to help people consider the impact of greater global understanding through culture.