On difference

Do not make agreement the price of belonging. People may share a table while disagreeing about how a life should be lived. Establish what their conduct at the table requires. Leave their inward lives in their own keeping.

The dissenter need not become a visionary to deserve a hearing. Leave room for the person who is simply mistaken. You have stood there too.

When a group agrees quickly, ask each person what they noticed before the agreement formed. A quiet reservation can disappear beneath the relief of belonging. Make room for it while the decision is still open, especially when the most powerful person has already spoken.

You owe a person consideration; you do not owe their claim your assent. Examine it. Ask for reasons. Offer yours without making the speaker’s humiliation your reward. An argument can be severe in its scrutiny and careful with the person who has brought it.

Do not require affection as proof of peaceful intent. Some people will live well beside you while keeping their distance. Let courtesy, reliable conduct, and a willingness to settle shared matters carry what intimacy cannot. A neighbour may remain a stranger without becoming a threat.

Protect time and space in which people can think beyond the group. Let a person walk a little way with an unfamiliar thought before asking where it leads. Some questions need solitude before they can bear an audience.

Difference does not relieve anyone of obligations they have freely undertaken. A shared workshop may require that its tools be returned and its dangers marked. Such requirements should answer to the work and the people affected. They need not extend into a prescribed way of life.

When two ways of living cannot share a particular space, seek an arrangement that preserves as much freedom as possible: different hours, different rooms, or a fair division of responsibilities. Sometimes people must part. Do not make the failure to live closely together a reason they must live as enemies.