The In-Between
Staying in Conversation When We Disagree
I seem to become a swimmer in warmer countries.
Perhaps it’s the pool and ocean being close by, the heat, or simply having nowhere I need to be. Whatever the reason, on holiday I find myself swimming. Length after length. Turn, push, breathe. There is something reassuring in the repetition. Gradually, my mind gives up its insistence on being somewhere else.
On this particular morning, I was nearing the end of my swim when I saw one of our neighbours waiting at the edge. We know each other in the way English people abroad sometimes do: a nod, a hello, the occasional conversation about the plumbing in the apartment block.
I came up for air.
“What about all these immigrants coming over on those boats?” he said.
Then, almost before I had found my breath: “The problem is they rape people.”
There are sentences that change the temperature of a conversation.For a moment, I noticed several impulses arriving together. The tightening in my body. The judgement. The wish to get away. That small internal voice saying, Here we go. And alongside them, something else: Stay.
Not agree. Not appease. Not pretend that what had been said didn’t matter. Just stay long enough to notice what was happening between us. After a few minutes, I said I didn’t think we were going to agree on this subject.
“You’re a lefty then.”
And there it was. A line drawn across the water.
Until that moment, we had been two neighbours at the end of a swimming pool. Now I was over there and he was over here. Two camps, carrying everything we were supposed to think about one another. When I eventually got out, he called after me.
“You’re going to go upstairs and tell your wife I’m a racist now.” I hadn’t said that.
But perhaps, once the line had been drawn, the rest of the conversation could be imagined without either of us having it. That is the part I keep returning to. As I walked away, I wondered whether I should have challenged him more directly. Whether I could have found the right words or persuaded him to reconsider. Those questions stayed with me, but another began to take shape.
How had a conversation between two people become a meeting between categories? And how often do I do the same thing? How quickly do I hear a sentence and begin constructing the person who must have said it? How easily we move from I disagree with you to I know what sort of person you are. Perhaps this is one of the seductions of divided times. A camp offers certainty. Once I know which side you belong to, I no longer have to encounter the complication of you.
“Lefty.” “Racist.”
Two words that can become opposite walls. Neither tells the whole story of the person standing behind it. Yet each of us carries a particular history of what we have loved, lost and learned. Our regrets, our joys, the things we believe and the things we haven’t quite worked out. A label leaves most of that unseen.
Perhaps belonging to a camp offers some shelter from the uncertainty of thinking for ourselves. I recognise that pull too: the relief of knowing where I belong, and which views will keep me there.
In Preaching to the Choir, Rebecca Solnit describes a public language increasingly shaped by binaries and sweeping categories. I recognise that.
But I want and try to remember that a person exceeds the category I place them in. Their words still matter. They are also never all there is to know. One disagreement can begin to stand for an entire person. Everything else slips out of view.
CG/VFX by Analog Studio; featuring motion-captured performance by Akram Khan.
I noticed a similar movement a few weeks later, although this time I felt it from the other side.I was attending a training in London, in a church surrounded by high-rise offices. The church and the corporate city stood beside one another, their different purposes sharing the same streets.
When the group came back together, the conversation turned towards the city outside and the idea that the people working there were all disconnected from nature. As people spoke, I felt a distance opening up. There were the people in the room, and then there were the people out there.
Londoners had become a category, viewed from the safety of the room. I wondered what that distance was helping us avoid. Perhaps there was discomfort underneath it. Perhaps it was easier to describe what was missing in other people than to name what felt uncertain in ourselves.
I had lived in London for years. The person being described could have been me. And even that wasn’t quite right, because London itself had never fitted neatly into the picture being drawn.
I know of a beehive I pass among the top of the glass and concrete, surrounded by offices. Every morning, someone arrives to tend to it. Even there, in that concentrated centre of commerce, someone was caring for bees.
Here another view slips in. The distinction between connected and disconnected, rooted and rootless, urban and natural began to feel less certain. What else had our description left out?
Different words. A different room. Again, I found myself watching a line being drawn.
My growing awareness of power complicates this, though. There is a version of “meeting in the middle” that asks too little of the person with more power and too much of the person carrying the cost. Holding the centre cannot mean treating every position as equally harmless. Nor can it mean asking someone to stay in a conversation that diminishes them.
Perhaps it means remaining open to relationships while keeping the difference, and its consequences, in view.I want to meet you, but I also want to see what stands between us. I want connection without asking either of us to pretend the ground is level. This is my hope and part of what interests me in my work with people and groups: what happens when difference enters the room, and how we respond before we have fully understood our own reaction.
Neuroscience offers one useful perspective. Research into emotion regulation suggests that how we attend to and interpret an experience can influence our emotional response. Our first reaction need not be our only response.
For me, that raises a practical question. Can we notice the tightening, the urge to withdraw, the story forming about the other person, and bring it into awareness before it decides our next move? That is something I want to keep working at and to help people explore. To recognise their reactions and create room for a more conscious choice: a question, a challenge, a boundary, or a willingness to listen further.
The aim is not agreement at any cost. It is to have more choice in how we meet what is happening.
I keep coming back to the pool.
Two ends. Water between them. The temptation to think the point is to arrive at one side or the other. But perhaps holding the centre means staying in the water long enough to resist making a person into a position. Long enough to notice the histories, fears and differences.
Understanding does not require agreement. Connection does not require pretending the ground is level. What might become possible if we could hold both?
There will be things I cannot reconcile myself to. Moments when a boundary is needed, when harm must be named, when staying in a relationship is neither possible nor right. I also recognise that I wasn’t the target of his words. That gave me room to stay in the conversation. For someone he was speaking about, staying might carry a different cost. Still, I am wary of the speed with which certainty can become distance.
Lefty. Racist. Us. Them.
Words can become walls before we notice we have stopped looking. I don’t think the answer is to have no convictions. I think it may be to hold them without letting them become the whole story of another person.
To remain reachable where I can. To keep wondering about the person beneath the position, while seeing clearly what stands between us.
The pool still has two ends.
But most of the living happens in between.