I look at a human being, even myself, and I see a fish, a monkey, a giant bacterium anomaly. A package of somatic intention, a temple of neurosynapses immersed in hairy foam rubber and assorted juices. I see a vector, a cloud of lines of embedded code, all projecting the phenomenon of difference.

How shall I address difference? Of so many things, difference seems to be a phenomenon – a deduction – concerned with distance: a farthering and isolating, then a bringing together, a uniting (or reuniting). These are the properties of a mosaic, with inconsistent fragments arranged together to eventually result in something (somehow) coherent. Difference is art and science, in purpose and in recursive motion. It is the permanent subject of mathematics.

Motion also requires time as well as distance. Emotion overwhelms the observer of excessive difference, striving with all due efficiency and means to recalibrate a worldview that incorporates, assimilates, homogenizes the disparate halves of known and unknown (familiar and unfamiliar). Indeed, difference is not heterogeneity, but the quaking phenomenon of experience between the heterogeneous and homogeneous. It is an elementary, essential rudiment to equilibrium and to relativity.

We – I – might feel morally compelled at times to minimize difference, but it absolutely mustn’t be mistaken for minimizing violence. We – I – mustn’t mistake stagnation for equilibrium. Peace is neither the ability to become, nor the state of becoming, accustomed to difference; peace is the side effect of complete recognition of the necessity of difference to health and progress. (In this way, peace can never actually be a goal per se, anymore than the Buddhist or meditator can call Enlightenment a goal.) Social progress will not come through a blindness or ignorance to difference, nor even a mere toleration of it; it will come through the transition from a fear of difference (a phobia of the unfamiliar) – the outcome of a geopolitically sensitive, culturally developed caution for impermanence and change, and coupled with a millennia-old biological inclination for conservativism toward one's immediate environment – to an appreciation of it.