Awkward Conversations

Why did the chicken cross the road?

It’s hard to get inside a chickens head to be honest. It’s hard enough to get inside the heads of some of our fellow humans, even the ones we know well. And they share the majority of our DNA. So understanding a chicken’s motivations might well be a step too far.

Empathy is the most human of qualities though, and leads to everything that is good about us. And the failure to even try to understand, to everything that is bad about us.

Sometimes the furthest that our attempts at empathy and understanding will take us, is to an awareness that some folk see things completely differently from ourselves. And that that is unlikely to change very much, if at all.

But those folk will continue to exist in the world, just like we do. Seeing things differently isn’t a criminal offence. And we don’t have to be the chicken who crosses the road to avoid having an awkward conversation.

Sometimes those are the conversations we most need to have.