ImpromptuEnlightenment

I was thinking about diversity the other day, and it occurred to me that we spend an awful lot of time arguing about it without ever asking a much simpler question. Why does it exist?

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Imagine designing a world where every person was identical. Every conversation would be predictable. Every invention would already exist. Every disagreement would disappear—not because we’d become enlightened, but because there would be no new perspectives to discover. We wouldn’t be experiencing life; we’d be watching the same movie on an endless loop.

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I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound very interesting. If everything and everyone were the same, what would there be left to discover? Maybe diversity serves a much larger purpose than we’ve considered.

I think we’ve made the word much smaller than it really is. We tend to think of diversity as categories of people. I think it’s really about categories of experience. Diversity isn’t simply about race, gender, culture, religion, or politics. It’s about the countless ways consciousness expresses itself. Introverts and extroverts.  Artists and engineers. Skeptics and mystics. Risk-takers and planners. Every one of them expands the range of human experience.

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Every meaningful conversation you’ve ever had happened because someone saw something you didn’t. So many inventions happened because somebody looked at the same problem differently. Every “I never thought about it that way” moment exists because someone brought a different perspective into the room.

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I don’t think that means we’re supposed to agree with everyone. I don’t think it means every idea has equal value. I do think another perspective has the potential to show us something we couldn’t have discovered on our own.

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I’ve often said that I think we’re here for Experience. And if that’s true:

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If Experience is why we’re here, then diversity isn’t a problem to solve. It’s one of the reasons we came.

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That changes the conversation for me. Instead of asking how to make everyone more like us, maybe we become curious about what would be lost if they did. Because if everyone approaches life exactly the way I do, then my world never gets any larger. It just gets louder with the sound of my own opinions.

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Maybe that’s the better question:

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The question isn’t whether I agree with everyone. The question is: What experience becomes impossible if everyone becomes me?

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I have a feeling the answer is… far more than I’d ever want to lose.

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Maybe diversity was never the obstacle. Maybe it was part of the design all along.

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© Rev. Tina M. Adkins