The meeting of human beings takes place at the level of emotions and feelings, because we all know what sadness is, what happiness is, what loss feels like, what joy is like, and uncertainty, anxiety, longing, regret, contentment: whatever the different sounds our languages give us to express them, our sense of them is the same.

It is our minds that draw the lines which become boundaries and defences, our thoughts which take a stand in our fears and our frailties and manifest as the attitudes which become the tyrants of the engagement.

And then every encounter, which could be a meeting, becomes a contest.

from "Pathways" by Simon Cole (in preparation)