There is an old story about a village whose water becomes poisoned.

Everyone who drinks it goes mad.

Except two people.

At first, they are relieved. They can see clearly while everyone else has lost their minds. But eventually they realize something disturbing: when everyone around you is seeing the world differently, your clarity can begin to look like insanity.

In one version of the story, the two remaining sane people eventually drink the water too. Before they do, they mark their foreheads so that, when they become like everyone else, they will at least remember that they were once able to see differently.

I think about that story when I watch us argue about politics.

Red sees blue as dangerous.

Blue sees red as dangerous.

Each side becomes increasingly certain that the other side is not merely mistaken, but somehow morally defective.

And the solution seems obvious:

Convince the other side that they are wrong.

But what if the deeper problem is not which side is right?

What if it is the position from which we are looking?

The hammer and the nail

There is an old saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Our backgrounds can work the same way.

A surgeon may see a condition and immediately think about what needs to be removed.

Another practitioner may look at the same condition and ask what caused it in the first place and how the underlying process might be changed.

Neither is necessarily wrong.

They are simply looking through different training.

Politics can become our training.

Once we identify ourselves as red or blue, we begin seeing through that lens. We notice what confirms our view. We become particularly skilled at finding evidence that the other side is wrong.

And the more convinced we become, the harder it is to notice that we are also inside the system we are criticizing.

The traffic

Imagine sitting in your car in a traffic jam.

You look ahead and see hundreds of cars.

You may think:

Why don’t these idiots know how to drive?

But now imagine rising above the traffic in a helicopter.

Suddenly you see something you couldn’t see from inside your car.

You see the whole pattern.

You see your car.

You see the cars in front of you.

You see the cars coming from the other direction.

And you realize:

My car is part of the traffic too.

That is a different kind of seeing.

It isn’t necessarily changing your political opinion.

It is changing your relationship to your political opinion.

You can still believe what you believe.

But now you can see your belief.

The taste of another way of seeing

This is where it gets really interesting.

If you’ve never experienced that helicopter view, being told about it doesn’t necessarily help.

You can understand the metaphor.

You can talk about awareness.

You can talk about seeing both sides.

You can even say, “I need to step back and see the bigger picture.”

But you may still be sitting in your car.

It’s like being told the name of a food you’ve never tasted.

You can know the word.

But the word has no taste.

And perhaps that is why moments of genuine awareness can be so important.

For a moment, something loosens.

The argument is still there.

The political beliefs are still there.

The irritation is still there.

But somehow you are no longer completely inside them.

You have stepped back.

You have had a taste.

And once you’ve had that taste, even if you fall back into the old pattern, something has changed.

You can remember:

I’ve seen this differently before.

The groove

Maybe this is part of what practice is for.

We fall out of awareness so easily that eventually we don’t even know we’ve fallen out.

We become identified with our thoughts, our emotions, our opinions, our bodies, our stories.

We forget there is another way of seeing.

Then something happens.

Discomfort.

Tension.

Frustration.

A feeling that something isn’t quite right.

Perhaps that discomfort is not merely a problem.

Perhaps it is a signal:

You’ve drunk the water again.

Awareness is still there.

But our access to recognizing it has become obscured.

Practice may not create awareness any more than walking creates the ground beneath our feet.

It may simply deepen the groove back toward recognition.

Each time we notice.

Each time we step back.

Each time we see the thought rather than becoming the thought.

The pathway becomes a little more familiar.

Until sometimes the return happens almost by itself.

Two ends of the stick

Perhaps red and blue are not two separate sticks.

Perhaps they are two ends of the same stick.

You cannot have one end without the other.

That doesn’t mean the two positions are equally valid.

It doesn’t mean we should stop thinking critically.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are genuinely dangerous or wrong.

It means something simpler:

Reality is larger than the position from which I happen to be looking at it.

The challenge is not always to climb higher and find out that the other side was wrong.

Sometimes the challenge is to climb high enough to see both sides—and myself among them.

Maybe that is the beginning of wisdom.

Not finding the right side.

But discovering that there is a place from which the whole stick can be seen.