It is difficult to understand people sometimes. Some people rub you the wrong way, but if you sit in the same space with anyone long enough seeking only to understand them, it will be hard to continue holding them in contempt. Of course, it depends on your stance. If you really want to hold them down in contempt, you will find reasons. It’s an orientation of your heart to attempt to understand and love someone you would have otherwise written off and walled off.

In these days when even people you love may have vastly different views from you (perhaps to your surprise), it is easy to find enemies. And it is ever more important to practice hospitality: inviting even your enemies into your space. If you attempt to hold someone you hate not just in your physical space, but in your heart – inside the boundaries of your physical body – it is even more difficult to go on hating them.

That is why the directive to love your enemies is so potent. We must have them in our hearts to do so. Our enemies are the people we attempt to keep far away from our hearts. It’s not that we shouldn’t have boundaries (in fact the boundaries are important), but a more developed person can hold their enemies and those who are most dangerous inside their heart and find love and compassion for them.

Try that with your nemesis – a “conservative,” a “liberal” or whoever you hold in contempt. The goal is to become one with them. That doesn’t mean they are the same as you. In fact, it is important to be able to distinguish ourselves from “others.” You cannot love someone unless they are an “other.” If they are the same as you, you are just loving yourself or an extension of yourself.

Perhaps the first move is to define yourself by what you are not so then you can spend the rest of your life learning to love what you are not. It may be that that is the whole goal of the universe. It divides into good and evil, black and white, right and wrong, and then it all comes back together, or learns to play nice.