How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

by Elif Shafak

when you feel alone don’t look within, look out and look beyond for others who feel the same way, for there are always others, and if you can connect with them and with their story, you will be able to see everything in a new light.

The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning. Because the truth is we don’t learn much from sameness and monotony. We usually learn from differences.

We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centres but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.

The less that people from different backgrounds can communicate and empathise with each other, the smaller our appreciation of our common humanity, the less egalitarian and inclusive our shared spaces, the more satisfied the demagogue.

are we immigrants synonymous to our accents? Or are we, or can we ever aspire to be, more than that? This is not to deny that our accents are fundamentally important to who we are, and they are near and dear to our hearts. They are an inextricable trace of the paths we have travelled, the loves we have loved and never forgotten, the scars we still carry and which still hurt. But that doesn’t mean we are from our accents.

belonging is not a once-and-for-all condition, a static identity tattooed on our skin; it is a constant self-examination and dynamic revision of where we are, who we are, and where we want to be.

Multiple belongings are nurtured by cultural encounters but they are not only the preserve of people who travel. It is an attitude, a way of thinking, rather than the number of stamps on your passport. It is about thinking of yourself, and your fellow human beings, in more fluid terms than solid categories.

Unless we manage to channel anger into a more productive, calmer but not necessarily less intense force, it runs the risk of becoming highly combustible and blindly destructive, burning through buildings and bridges and human connections, burning in a vicious cycle in which violence begets more violence. We cannot let that happen.

Information flows amid our fingers like dry sand. It also gives us the illusion that we know the subject (and if we don’t, we just ‘google’ it) when, in truth, we know so little. Paradoxically, too much information is an obstacle in front of true knowledge.

Perhaps in an era when everything is in constant flux, in order to be more sane, we need a blend of conscious optimism and creative pessimism. In the words of Gramsci, ‘the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will’.

Do not be afraid of complexity. Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity.