Whilst I was in my outdoor bath looking up at the stars on Saturday night my partner started speaking about a writer he reads who is outside of his ‘bubble’. I had the realisation that although I have been taught to think critically at university, I rarely read newspapers or articles that come from the opposite side of the political spectrum to me.

I am aware that the trend towards division has been growing and I have been told this is exacerbated by computer algorithms fueled by profit through advertising that is getting out of our control. I think that the question of political division has felt to big and hard for me to get my head around but I have had a bit of a wake-up call recently.

I have a sort of father figure, Jim, who I lived with when I was 18 at a very formative time in my life. Since then we stay in touch and I go to visit when I can although him and his wife Helen live in the very north of Scotland on the way to Orkney. Last time I visited I was surprised at the dinner table to hear him speak about Black Lives Matter protests as if the protesters were terrorists and should be imprisoned for their behaviour against the police. I asked which protest he was speaking about and he showed me the news coverage for the event. I showed him the different news coverage of the same event from a source I read and trust. The accounts were so startlingly different – photos cropped to either portray the police or the protesters as more or less violent – videos edited to change the meaning of speeches. I was shocked. It was a wake-up call. It is easy for me to say he had gone down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and articles that an algorithm squirreled him down but equally, I have been funneled in the other direction.

We see the world so differently now. In only ten years we have been travelling in different directions. To the point where meeting together is now painful. His views on equal pay for women are sexist to me. His view on Black Lives Matters is racist to me. His views on same sex marriage are homophobic to me. But beneath it all, I see him as a father figure still, and I love him. And this is what I told him. I told him I love him. I told him he could not push me and all the people he knew, and even his wife away. That he might be finding community of like-minded people online but that we are his family in the flesh and we won’t let it come between us.

This is how I am trying to ‘navigate divides in my community’. I am trying to love my way through pain and division. I am trying to have the courage, knowing that if we avoid the uncomfortable conversations now they will only become impossible and completely intolerable conversations in twenty years time. I am noticing my avoidance of pain and discomfort and I am asking friends to keep me accountable to staying in that place of uncertainty and difference and summoning the courage to see love and connection when capitalism and other forces want us only to see division.