Appreciating Differences and Diversity

Men and women are different. This is not a “bad” thing. We get to celebrate our differences and our sameness simultaneously. We all think we desire equality, but do we really desire equity? It’s safe to be different, in fact necessary.

Being diverse is what drives our thriving and surviving. Our difference compliments who we are and who we can become. Our issue is we make our differences (whether race, skin colour, age, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) mean superiority or inferiority – usually based on old value sets and individuals perpetuating an ideology of hungry excessive power.

This extreme and entrenched fear to lose power is detrimental to our culture. This imposed divide is limiting us and distancing us. The chasm we are creating out of spite, fear, hate and apprehension to be intimate is destroying our souls and relationships.

The difference is healthy. It is both a difference and sameness that we are attracted to. We need difference for attraction, otherwise, we repel too easily what we are witnessing. There is a dance between both men and women and the masculine and feminine. This dance allows us to “know ourselves” through the other.

To be enthralled by the unfamiliar and choose to come close based on the familiar allows us to deepen our knowledge of who we are. Equity not equality is what we perhaps truly desire.

Can we forgive the past and then create a future where we embrace the present as an opportunity to see each other with presence and truth? Can we recognize our differences as a catalyst to bring us closer?

Trying to create uniformity in everything we are and do is breeding stagnation and causing us to not be magnetized or attracted to each other. and TAG that person that brings out that difference in you.

One is glad to be of service.

STEFANOS SIFANDOS

Relational Alchemist, Speaker & Author