"Certainty is the enemy of unity"

Curiosity and the work of meeting each other across universes of our own making.

---

When my kids were little, we loved Thomas the Train. One day, I had this realization that my office eerily reflected the Island of Sodor. Every character wanted to be useful, everyone wanted attention, and everyone went off the rails when they weren’t validated.

Are most adults just toddlers who’ve learned to manage their impulses a little better? We know how to be polite, but at our core, we still want what we want, test boundaries, and need to be seen.

Now put billions of us together online, and what you get isn’t one shared reality through connection, you get a multiverse. Each of us lives in a reality shaped by what we consume, who we surround ourselves with, and what we believe. My feed isn’t your feed. My truth isn’t your truth. And as we’ve seen recently, sometimes those universes collide hard.

That’s what I saw after the shooting on Utah State’s campus. Leaders rushed to say, “Violence has no place here.” But let’s be real: violence has always had a place here. This country was founded through violence, expanded with it, and still glorifies and monetizes it. We sing it at baseball games, "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air". We go to work and say things like “boots on the ground” and “all hands on deck”, all military references. Violence is tolerated as entertainment; the NFL, WWE, MMA, reality television, video games, and must-watch premier TV are all examples.  Are we surprised when violent rhetoric spills over into violent acts?

And violence certainly isn’t the only contradiction we live with. So among these incongruities, where does that leave us? If we disengage entirely, people don’t stop, they just find another space where their tantrums are validated and others clap along. 

But if we engage without boundaries, we legitimize the tantrum. The work, then, is somewhere in the middle: we correct, we redirect, we build communities where truth and empathy matter more than volume.

Because here’s what I believe to be true: we’ve romanticized or relativized horrors that should have been met with firm, shared reality. When cruelties are appeased this way, accountability evaporates.

I also believe curiosity is an antidote to fear. There’s a quote from Star Wars that often makes the rounds, and for good reason: Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

Curiosity slows that spiral. It lets us look at each other not as adversaries but as human beings. We can find commonality in problems, but only if we agree on what the problem is. And, there’s rarely just one problem; it’s a constellation. Some stars burn hotter, others dimmer, but all are connected. What looks brightest depends on where you’re standing, and which universe you’re in. The work is tracing the whole constellation, not just staring at the star that confirms our view.

And still, I wrestle. 

My going back and forth reminds me of a line from the most recent Downton Abbey film: “Convention makes cowards of us all.”  A simple line that encapsulates truth. Convention keeps us quiet when we should speak, polite when we should resist, complicit when we should draw a line. Convention tells us not to make a fuss, not to disrupt, not to risk belonging - even when what’s at stake is far more important than upholding that convention.

James Baldwin wrote, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” Baldwin goes on, “To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other.

So maybe the task isn’t to collapse the multiverse into one neat universe. Maybe it’s this: hold firm on what is real, nurture curiosity where it can grow, refuse to call “love” anything rooted in harm and the denial of humanity, and build the kind of worlds where our souls, even when trembling, can meet.

Because if we don’t agree on the constellation of problems we face, we’ll never build the solution. And if we mistake amplification for truth, the trains aren’t just running on different tracks, they’re barreling toward collision.

The views and perspectives shared here are my own and should not be considered the views of any employer, client, or partner I have a relationship with unless expressly stated.