Hey folks. Some of you may have noted the headline that the Oxford English Dictionary team said we learned so many significant new words this year that they couldn’t pick just one so they noted several, including “doomscrolling”. No definition required for that one, it seems to me. FYI- this email includes enough information that some scrolling may be required, but none of it is about doom. Just wanted to mention that in case you could use a break from the aforementioned pastime.

Talky Bit: If we think about it at all, we are most likely to think about the way we perceive the world around us as “reality”. We continue to hold this perspective despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. In fact, we’re so committed to this understanding that we can use a phrase like “common sense” with a straight face. (Essayist G.K. Chesterton once said that the problem with common sense is that it isn’t common. Not quite on point, but a pithy quote.) If we want to learn how to love one another as disparate human beings with differing perspectives, we need to start exercising our new-point-of-view muscles. We need to learn to see the world through lenses other than the ones that define reality for us. Hard work sometimes, to be sure – but also interesting, engaging and enlarging. This week in the Talky Bit we’ll consider someone else’s picture of how we might imagine what humans have in common. Hint – it has something to do with the subject line.