This is November 23 2022, the day before Thanksgiving. And I found myself this morning sympathizing with people, many of us who will be meeting relatives or friends who are not used to hanging with, especially sitting down at Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow with friends and family and family of friends and friends of family and so forth. And how fraught, that can be, how difficult it can be when we're mixing with people we wouldn't ordinarily choose to mix with. But because of our karmic affinity, here we are. Sitting down. This is it's just everyone knows this is this is the kind of a thing that many have written about, many have joked about how to deal with this, this situation. And it is a challenging one, it can be for sure, who can expect when you get together Thanksgiving, either at the table itself or flying in to see people or having people fly in to see us who can expect that everything will go harmoniously. So I thought I might offer some advice for what it's worth, based on life experience, of course, and what works better than other things are worse than other things. So these people are seeing over Thanksgiving dinner, before or after, may have very different views than we do about a number of things. Politics, of course, partisan politics, religion. Oh, diet, that's can easily come up over over dinner, health, books, movies, oh, all kinds of ways that we're going to experience quite a lot of diversity, when we sit down with these people. And naturally, there will be people are almost certainly likely to be people who we don't see as like minded. And then in the course of conversation, especially if there's any alcohol served, then things can get interesting. So what I have found is that the worst mistake we can make is to try to persuade others who have different views from ours, to persuade them of the reason behind our own our own views. There have been, there's been so much research that concluded that we rarely can change anyone's mind, through reason through argument through rational persuasion. It doesn't work. They say, the social scientists. It doesn't mean we can't skillfully offer a different perspective that might be helpful. Especially if we hear things that are offensive to US racial racist remarks, or other things. In a way we could say we it's our obligation to speak up. But then how do we do that skillfully. This is really what Zen practice comes down to with other people is skillful means how do we how do we help people skillfully and from everything I've read? We're not it's not going to be skillful. If we argue and try to persuade If people at length of our point of view, unless, of course, if we can, if we can do so dispassionately, if we're if we're pretty sure we we aren't attached to our, our view or our opinion. We're not going to dig our heels in, there could be situations Yes. Where both parties, the speaker and the listener can can find some meeting of the minds. So, yeah, it depends on the situation. And then, if we don't seem to be getting anywhere, then we could ask ourself what is more important to us? Being right? Or having a decent relationship? Or at least a decent relationship over dinner? This is such a such a sensitive thing. How far do you go in offering a different point of view? But I think it requires humility, that we're not going to make a lot of headway with most people who see things differently. The best thing we could do is to try to find common ground. How do you do that? You do the best you can.