Most people – maybe more than you think – are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.

“That means seeing people with generous eyes, offering trust to others before they trust you. That means adopting a certain posture toward the world. If you look at others with the eyes of fear and judgment, you will find flaws and menace; but if you look out with a respectful attitude, you’ll often find imperfect people enmeshed in uncertainty, doing the best they can.

“Will casting this kind of attention change the people you are encountering? Maybe; maybe not. But this is about who you are becoming in corrosive times. Are you becoming more humane or less? Are you a person who obsesses over how unfairly you are treated, or are you a person who is primarily concerned by how you see and treat others? ‘Virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is’, Iris Murdoch wrote.”

The second piece, Ambiguous, Unusual Couplings by Jeanine M. Canty, describes what we have to gain by being able to be in close, respectful relationships with people who differ vastly from ourselves. She calls this ‘unusual coupling’.

“The fierce individuality encouraged within our Western, and particularly US, identity has turned us away from community orientation, from empathy and service to the whole, toward a series of self-oriented, transactional relationships. Paired with the convenience of tailored social media, news, and other forms of information, we can live in a reality that mirrors the opinions and people we want around us and easily weed out those we do not. People, communities, and genuine issues become disposable.

“[Unusual coupling] is about being able to hold the ambiguity of differing viewpoints but still coming together. In healthy relationships, we experience periods of challenge, dislike, boredom, apathy, and conflict, yet keep choosing to come back to the work of connection. In our current culture, it’s all too easy to end a relationship when things become difficult. We can find new people to spend time with that do not yet know our faults or disagree with our opinions. …

“Research has shown that in order to expand our worldviews, we need to have experiences that disrupt them – disorienting dilemmas. A disorienting dilemma occurs when we have an experience that does not currently fit into our worldview and provides the opportunity to experience cognitive dissonance and, if mindful, to work with the dilemma and expand our perspectives.

“As we enter into unusual couplings and develop the skills to work with and expand our worldviews, we may begin to notice that the truths that we hold so dearly are not so cut and dry. There are reasons why we live inside constructed worldviews and there are reasons why other people do as well.”

What Happened to Empathy?

Ten Infrequently Asked Questions