Week Fifty-One: Celebrating Diversity and Difference

One of the most nourishing aspects of my life in New York City is the ever-present experience of diversity. People of every shape, color, size, style, and language inhabit the streets of New York and provide a never-ending parade of human ingenuity and self-expression. This experience always reminds me of the fact that the healthiest eco-systems in nature are those with the greatest diversity of species, and it reminds me that what makes humanity such a vibrant and creative species is our tendency to express ourselves in such a wide variety of ways.

While difference and diversity may at times be sources of stress when we bump up against new ways of believing and being, it is a constant opportunity to stretch beyond our everyday assumptions about ourselves and the world. Rubbing elbows with people who are different from ourselves invites us to confront and examine our assumptions about the customs, beliefs, and approaches to daily living we have come to take for granted.

There’s another area where diversity and difference may challenge us. Animals, insects, and certain plants become identified as “pests”, even though they have an invaluable and irreplaceable role in the overall ecology of the environment. They may create fear, discomfort, or inconvenience for us, even as they do their appointed job in the scheme of things. For example, maggots might seem disgusting to many people, and yet they play an essential role in the decay of organic matter. Or dandelions – something many gardeners in the United States seek to eradicate from their lawns, while people from other countries consider dandelion greens a health-giving delicacy to be encouraged and harvested. An exercise that can be both challenging and rewarding has to do with considering the place these “pests” have in the scheme of things and examining our automatic reactions to them.

This week’s experiment invites you to explore your relationship with difference and diversity, to discover your edge of comfort with people, food, styles, “pests” and other situations that are different from your everyday assumptions and experience.

As with every other experiment, there’s no place to arrive with this one. Instead, if offers another opportunity to explore your thinking and responses, enhance your ability to be conscious of your thoughts and actions, to increase awareness of how you move through your world, and generate an opportunity to bring choice to the foreground of your experience.

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