Difference

At best, half my life went by before I noticed it: that we were different.

During that time I thought talking to be sufficient: it took an age to realise that superficial similarities were just that. A full ten years passed during which all I could think was 'Why can't I make myself understood?' Far too late I realised that understanding moves at a glacial pace; that what I can say is only what can be heard. That 'understanding' is a collective noun.

And through my own selfish predicament the slow recognition of difference in others; how they could speak and not be heard, explain and not be understood.

Now I sit in meetings quietly noting misunderstandings destined to last a lifetime, which no amount of chatter can dispel.

There are differences which arise across cultures or generations; the alienation of Shakespearean verse, the curiousness of Scandinavian sensitivity. But these pale in significance when compared to our own divisions: those who speak but cannot think, those who think but cannot speak. Those who inhabit a world of things, and the parallel lives of those inhabiting a world of others.

For difference, language becomes an enemy - a curious kind of trap: censoring it so that there is only a trace - some anxious straining at the page.

What to do? To shout louder and louder? Or to quietly plant strange words hoping that decades hence they will blossom, all the while suspecting they will wither and die?