The fascination of difference

People's behavior fascinates me. It also, occasionally, mystifies me. One of the pleasures of life experience is how it enhances empathy: I've lived through enough to have an inkling about many - even most - situations I come across.

There are circumstances which leave me scratching my head. Not in condemnation; I find you have to understand, or (mistakenly) think you do to get up the necessary righteousness to condemn. Where you truly don't understand where the other person is coming from, it's almost like an itch you can't scratch. It's compulsive. Enquiring minds want to know. It's not idle curiosity either. It's the need to add to my inner map of the world, maybe.

Since I have just enough manners to restrain myself from inappropriate enquiries (usually), it's an itch I can't often scratch. Perhaps that's why I'm drawn to fiction, both reading and writing it, to understand viewpoints that are so very different from my own.

This is post 16 of 43 posts.
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