We’re All Right. Are We Alright?

Nuance.

That’s the word that’s been sitting with me this week.

I was listening to Trevor Noah on a podcast, and they were discussing the difference between being open to learning and taking up a position, planting a flag in it and then defending it at all costs. Not debating or exploring… just defending.

It stayed with me.

The idea that once we decide we’re right, we often stop being curious and gather evidence. We refine our lines and listen just enough to respond.

And yet, from our perspective, we are right.
That’s the part I keep returning to.

Sydney Banks talked about us living in separate realities. Not separate worlds physically but separate psychological ones – each of us experiencing life through our own thinking, based on our own history and interpretations.

If that’s true, then it makes sense that we feel right. I mean how could we not? We’re seeing what we’re seeing from where we’re standing.

So in that sense we’re all right.

Which makes the tone of so much public conversation feel even more curious because if we’re all right, why does it so often feel like we’re not alright?

Perhaps it hasn’t always been like this.

Maybe rose-tinted, maybe not but I have a sense that we once had more room for proper discourse. More back-and-forth that was about testing ideas rather than defending identities. Debate felt like debate. You could disagree robustly without it turning into a quiet sorting exercise of “with us” or “against us”.

Now it can feel as though positions harden quickly, as though there’s a subtle pressure to declare where you stand and stay there.

I don’t place myself outside of that. I’ve felt the pull of it too. There are moments when it’s tempting to tidy everything up into a clear stance and hold it firmly. There’s a certain neatness to certainty, like a kind of internal click when an argument lines up cleanly.

But over time, certainty has started to feel less solid to me than it once did. Not wrong, just heavier.

I still have views. I care about things. That hasn’t changed but what has shifted slowly, not dramatically, is my appreciation of how shaped those views are. How much they depend on the particular path I’ve walked and the assumptions I absorbed without noticing.

The older I get the more I see that my perspective is both real and partial. True to me, and incomplete.

And that recognition seems to open up a little more space than there used to be.

Nuance comes back into view.

Nuance says that two people can both be right from where they stand and still disagree. It makes room for the possibility that there is more here than my first reaction suggests.

And this is where the play on words keeps nudging me.

If we are all right, in the sense that our perspectives make sense to us, then perhaps we can be alright, too.

Alright with the fact that others see differently.
Alright with not converting them.
Alright with the space between positions.

That doesn’t mean abandoning conviction. It simply means recognising the limits of our own vantage point.

We’re all right.

And perhaps being alright together begins closer to home. In the way we listen at the dinner table. In how we respond when someone disagrees with us. In remembering that none of us sees the whole picture, only the version that makes sense from where we stand.