Over the past few years, I’ve found myself writing more and more about perspective — about the worlds we think through, the lenses we inherit, and the quiet ways our understanding of each other is shaped by culture, history, and experience. At the time, I thought I was simply following a thread of curiosity. But looking back, I can see that those reflections were also carrying something else: a sense of unease I hadn’t yet named.
It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t even conscious. It was more like noticing a subtle change in the weather — a shift in the air pressure, a faint cooling of the atmosphere. A feeling that something in the world was no longer sitting quite right.
For a long time, I couldn’t articulate it. I only knew that the optimism I once held — a gentle, joyful belief that society was slowly becoming more open to difference — had begun to feel less certain. Not gone, but altered. Tempered.
I used to believe, perhaps a little naively, that the arc of acceptance was bending steadily in the right direction. That diversity, in all its forms, was becoming something to value rather than tolerate. That the world was learning to make space for a wider range of human experiences — neurodiversity, gender identity, sexuality, culture, religion, ethnicity, disability.
But lately, it has felt as though that arc has wavered.
Not broken. Not reversed. Just… less sure of itself.
Across many parts of the world, diversity has begun to be spoken of as if it were a problem to be solved rather than a richness to be embraced. Inclusion is being questioned. Communities that once felt the slow warmth of acceptance are now facing a colder wind of suspicion. And even here in Aotearoa — a place that often prides itself on fairness and openness — the shift is noticeable.
It is not that people have suddenly become hostile. It is that the social goodwill that once felt abundant now feels thinner, more fragile, more easily disrupted.
And so I find myself holding a different kind of hope than I once did.
Not the buoyant, joyful hope of a world opening its arms. But a quieter, steadier, more determined hope — the kind that keeps walking even when the path becomes uneven.
Joyful hope says, “Things are getting better.” Determined hope says, “Even when things get harder, the journey is still worth taking.”
Joyful hope is carried by favourable winds. Determined hope is carried by resolve.
Joyful hope is a springtime feeling. Determined hope is a winter skill.
And perhaps this is the kind of hope the moment calls for.
Because the truth is that many communities are feeling this shift — not just one. Disabled communities. Queer and trans communities. Migrant communities. Religious minorities. Ethnic minorities. Anyone whose existence challenges a narrow definition of “normal”.
The details differ, but the pattern is the same: a retreat from difference, a narrowing of what is acceptable, a growing discomfort with complexity.
And yet, despite this, I do not feel despair.
If anything, I feel a deeper clarity about what matters.
I am reminded that inclusion was never a straight line. That progress has always been uneven. That every generation faces its own version of this tension between fear and openness, between sameness and diversity, between certainty and curiosity.
And I am reminded that hope — real hope — is not the belief that things will always get better. It is the commitment to keep moving toward a more generous world even when the way forward is not obvious.
It is the belief that the journey is worthwhile, even when the path bends.
So this is where I find myself now: not disillusioned, but grounded. not hopeless, but determined. not naïve, but still willing to imagine a future where difference is not something to fear.
A future where we can hold space for each other’s ways of being. A future where diversity is not a threat but a source of strength. A future where communities — all communities — can stand without apology.
This is the hope I carry. Not joyful, but steadfast. Not light, but enduring. Not effortless, but deeply human.
Part One explored the childhood experiences that shaped my unease with certainty. In adulthood, those early lessons resurfaced in unexpected ways — in how I understood my own mind, in the life my wife and I built together, and in the spiritual language I eventually found for what I had been living all along.
Neurodivergence and the Habit of Questioning Perception
As I grew older, I began to realise that my way of moving through the world was not quite the same as those around me. I didn’t have the language for neurodivergence then — that understanding came much later — but I knew that I noticed things others seemed to miss, and missed things others seemed to take for granted. What I experienced as careful observation or thoughtful hesitation was often misread as confusion, indecision, or naïveté. For much of my life, I carried the sense of being slightly out of step with the rhythm everyone else seemed to follow effortlessly.
My parents, perhaps sensing this difference long before I did, took extra care to explain the “why” behind things. They didn’t expect me to accept rules at face value; they helped me understand the reasoning beneath them. That emphasis on explanation over obedience became a kind of internal compass. It taught me that perception is not the same as reality, and that people can interpret the same moment in very different ways. It also taught me to pause before drawing conclusions — not out of uncertainty, but out of respect for the complexity of what lay beneath the surface.
Over time, I came to see that this habit of questioning my own perception was not a flaw but a form of clarity. It made me cautious about easy answers and wary of anyone who claimed to see the world without distortion. Where others seemed comfortable with certainty, I felt an instinctive pull toward nuance — not because I lacked conviction, but because I understood, almost viscerally, that every perspective is shaped by the lens through which it is seen.
Living six decades without a diagnosis meant that I learned to navigate the world by building my own frameworks, often quietly and intuitively. Those frameworks were shaped by reasoning, by observation, and by a deep awareness that my experience was only one among many. That awareness didn’t make me doubt myself; it made me attentive to the limits of my own vantage point. And it reinforced something I had been learning since childhood: that truth is rarely singular, and that certainty — especially when unexamined — can be a fragile foundation on which to build a worldview.
Two Lenses, One Life — Marriage Across Cultures
If childhood taught me that truth has more than one vantage point, adulthood confirmed it in the most intimate way. When I married my wife — a woman whose early life unfolded in rural Japan, shaped by customs, rhythms, and assumptions very different from my own — I didn’t yet realise how profoundly our shared life would deepen my understanding of perspective. At the time, I simply knew that we cared for one another and that we were willing to build a life together. Only later did I come to see that our marriage would become one of my clearest teachers.
Living side by side, we discovered again and again that we could look at the same moment and see something subtly, or sometimes strikingly, different. Not because either of us was wrong, but because we were each shaped by the cultural lenses we carried with us — lenses formed long before we met, and refined over decades of shared experience. Even after more than fifty years together, we still occasionally stumble across assumptions we didn’t know we held, shaped by the landscapes of our childhoods and the stories we absorbed without realising.
What has always struck me is how naturally we learned to navigate those differences. There was no need to resolve them into a single viewpoint, no pressure to decide whose interpretation was “correct.” Instead, we learned to hold both perspectives at once, recognising that each revealed something the other could not. Our marriage became a quiet practice in humility — a daily reminder that no one sees the world directly, and that every understanding is filtered through the lens of a particular life.
This shared life has taught me that plurality is not a threat to be managed but a richness to be embraced. It has shown me that two people can inhabit the same moment with different understandings and still move forward together with respect, curiosity, and affection. And it has reinforced something I first sensed as a child and have carried with me ever since: that certainty leaves no room for the complexity of human experience, while humility allows us to see the world through more than one pair of eyes.
Finding Language for What I Had Been Living — Lloyd Geering and Quakerism
Long before I encountered Quakerism, I had already been shaped by ideas that challenged rigid belief and invited a more spacious understanding of truth. I was seventeen when Lloyd Geering first came to national attention in 1966, and eighteen when the Presbyterian Church formally charged him with “doctrinal error” and “disturbing the peace of the Church” the following year. His sermons — questioning the literal resurrection and the immortality of the soul, and asking instead what meaning these stories might hold for a modern world — spilled far beyond church walls. People were discussing theology in pubs, at sewing bees, in workplaces, in places where religion was rarely mentioned at all.
What struck me at the time was not the controversy itself, but how closely Geering’s way of thinking paralleled instincts I already carried. His insistence that truth has many vantage points, that our understanding is always filtered through the lens of our culture and experience, felt immediately familiar. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I recognised something of myself in his approach — a refusal to treat any single narrative as complete, and a willingness to ask what deeper meaning might lie beneath the surface of inherited stories.
It would be another decade before I encountered the Quaker tradition, but when I did, it felt less like discovering something new and more like finding a home for the worldview I had been quietly forming since childhood. The Quaker emphasis on lived truth rather than doctrinal certainty, on listening rather than asserting, on humility rather than proclamation, gave shape to instincts that had long been part of me. In the Meeting, I found a community that trusted silence as a form of knowing and treated discernment as a shared practice rather than an individual claim to insight.
Together, Geering’s thought and Quaker practice offered me both language and structure for what I had been living all along. They affirmed that religion, at its best, is not a set of propositions to defend but a way of being in the world — a mode of living grounded in relationship, humility, and openness to complexity. They also clarified why absolutism, whether religious or secular, has always felt so foreign to me. Certainty leaves no room for the truths that lie outside our own line of sight. Humility, by contrast, allows us to recognise that our perspective is one among many, and that understanding is something we build together rather than possess alone.
Returning to the Present
Coming back to the comments that prompted this reflection, I can see now why they unsettled me in the way they did. It wasn’t the criticism of religion itself; I’ve lived long enough, and thought long enough, to know that religion can be both harmful and life‑giving, sometimes in the same breath. What jarred me was the certainty — the sense that a single conclusion could be applied universally, without regard for context, history, or the lived experience of others.
For someone else, those comments might have passed unnoticed. But for me, they touched a thread that runs back through my entire life: the understanding that truth is always shaped by the vantage point from which it is seen. From my parents’ relational ethics, to the Kaumātua’s stories, to the quiet courage of my mother at the races, to the way my wife and I have learned to navigate our different lenses, to the insights of Lloyd Geering and the practice of Quaker discernment — all of these have taught me that the world is too complex, too layered, too full of human variation to be captured by any single, absolute claim.
So when I encounter certainty expressed without hesitation, especially from people whose values I usually share, it feels like a dissonance — not because I disagree with their conclusions, but because the confidence itself seems out of step with the humility that genuine understanding requires. It reminds me how easily any of us can slip into thinking that our perspective is the perspective, and how quickly that can close the door to the truths that lie outside our own line of sight.
This essay, then, is not a rebuttal of those comments, nor a defence of religion, nor a critique of the people who wrote them. It is simply an attempt to understand why they struck me so forcefully, and to trace the path that has shaped my own resistance to absolutism. It is a way of returning to the question that stopped me mid‑scroll: Why does this unsettle me so deeply?
A Gentle Closing — Living With Complexity
As I sit with all of this, I realise that my discomfort with certainty is not a flaw to be corrected but a thread woven through the whole of my life. It comes from childhood lessons in dignity and relationship, from stories that revealed the limits of any single narrative, from the quiet differences my wife and I have navigated over decades, from the insights of thinkers who challenged inherited assumptions, and from a spiritual tradition that trusts silence more than proclamation. These experiences have taught me that understanding is something we grow into, not something we possess.
So when I encounter certainty expressed without hesitation, it touches something deep — not because I think people shouldn’t hold strong views, but because I know how easily certainty can close the door to the truths that lie beyond our own vantage point. The world is too complex, too layered, too full of human variation to be captured by any single frame. And yet, we keep trying. Perhaps that is simply part of being human.
What I hope, for myself as much as for anyone reading this, is that we can learn to hold our convictions lightly — not weakly, but with the humility that comes from knowing they are shaped by the lenses through which we see. That we can remain open to the possibility that someone else’s experience might reveal something our own cannot. That we can resist the temptation to collapse complexity into certainty, even when certainty feels comforting.
In the end, this essay is not about the comments that unsettled me. It is about the long path that led me to pause at them, and the values that have shaped that pause. It is about recognising that discomfort can be a teacher, pointing us back to the places where our deepest commitments were formed. And it is about remembering that the world is richer, and more generous, when we allow room for more than one way of seeing.
I don’t expect everyone to share my unease with absolutism. But I do hope that, in a world increasingly drawn to simple answers, we can make space for the kind of humility that keeps us listening. Because in the end, it is in listening — to one another, to our own histories, to the quiet truths that emerge when certainty falls away — that we find the possibility of understanding.
I found myself unsettled the other day while reading a series of comments on a blog I follow. The writers were people whose values I usually share — thoughtful, evidence‑minded, wary of dogma — yet their certainty about the harmfulness of all religion struck me with unexpected force. It wasn’t the conclusion that jarred me so much as the confidence with which it was expressed, a confidence that felt strangely out of step with the humility they normally champion. That moment made me stop, mid‑scroll, and ask myself a question I’ve returned to many times over the years: Why does certainty — especially when it comes from people I respect — unsettle me so deeply?
Naming the Real Issue — Certainty, Not Religion
As I sat with that question, it became clear that what unsettled me wasn’t the criticism of religion itself. I’ve lived long enough, and seen enough, to know that religion can cause harm as easily as it can nurture compassion. What jarred me was the certainty — the sense that a single conclusion could be applied to every form of religion, in every context, without remainder. It reminded me how easily any of us, no matter how committed we are to evidence and reason, can slip into treating our perceptions as universal truths.
The more I reflected, the more I realised that the tension I felt had little to do with religion and everything to do with absolutism. I’ve encountered certainty in many guises over the years — religious, political, ideological, even scientific — and it has always made me uneasy. Not because conviction is wrong, but because certainty leaves no room for the complexity of human experience. It flattens the world into a single vantage point and mistakes that vantage point for reality itself.
That, I realised, was the real issue. Not the content of the claims, but the confidence with which they were made. And as I turned that over in my mind, I found myself remembering an unfinished draft I wrote years ago, trying to understand why absolutism — in any form — has always felt like a warning bell to me.
Sitting with that unease, I found myself thinking back to an unfinished draft I wrote years ago, an attempt to trace the roots of my discomfort with absolutism. I never completed it at the time, but the questions it held have stayed with me, quietly shaping the way I move through the world. This seemed like the moment to return to that earlier reflection — not to continue it, but to understand what it was pointing toward. To see, more clearly, how I came to trust complexity over certainty, and why that trust feels so deeply woven into who I am.
When I look back to understand why certainty makes me uneasy, I always return first to my childhood. Long before I had words like “ethics” or “pluralism,” I was shaped by a way of living that treated people as relationships to be honoured rather than problems to be solved. I grew up in a whānau where difference wasn’t something to fear, and where unfamiliarity wasn’t treated as a threat. People were met as people — not as categories, not as abstractions, not as representatives of anything larger than themselves.
My parents didn’t divide the world into right and wrong, good and bad, saved and unsaved. They didn’t punish us when we caused harm. Instead, they explained why an action mattered, how it affected someone else, and what it meant to consider another person’s experience. Looking back, I realise how unusual that was for the 1950s and 60s, when obedience was often valued more than understanding. But in our home, ethics was never about rules. It was about relationships — the living, breathing connections between people, and the responsibility we carry for one another.
One of the quiet gifts of that upbringing was the freedom to sit with the Kaumātua (a Māori elder) who lived next door — an almost blind, almost deaf woman with a moko kauae and a lifetime of stories. Many parents of the time might have kept their children away from someone they didn’t understand. Mine didn’t. They saw a neighbour, not an oddity. Because of that, I heard stories of Waitara and Parihaka years before I encountered the official versions at school. I didn’t know it then, but those conversations planted the idea that truth has more than one vantage point, and that the stories we inherit are never the whole story.
Another layer settled the day my mother — a woman barely 150 centimetres tall — stood up to a group of racegoers who were mocking two men dressed in matching pleated miniskirts. At the time, I didn’t think about their sexual orientation; it simply didn’t occur to me. What I saw were two men dressed in a way that was unconventional for the era, and, to my young eyes, rather stylish. What my mother saw, I suspect, was something more immediate: a crowd beginning to feed on its own delight in taunting difference, a mood that could so easily tip from mockery into menace.
It took tremendous courage for her to step forward in that moment. The crowd was large, loud, and moving as crowds sometimes do — toward a kind of collective unkindness that no single person would have embraced on their own. My mother broke that feedback loop with a few firm words, reminding everyone present of what it means to be decent. The effect was instant. The jeering stopped. A kind of collective shame settled over the group, as if people suddenly recognised themselves and didn’t much like what they saw.
What stayed with me was not the incident itself, but the silence that followed. My mother never lectured me about what had happened. She didn’t turn it into a lesson about tolerance or bravery. She simply acted from a place of instinctive respect, and then carried on with her day. From that, I learned something that has shaped me ever since: dignity is something you extend to others, not something you wait to have validated.
These early experiences formed the bedrock of my ethics. They taught me that strength can be quiet, relational, and grounded in empathy rather than certainty. They taught me that truth is rarely singular. And they taught me that the world is far more complex — and far more beautiful — than any rigid framework can capture.
Learning That Truth Has More Than One Vantage Point
If my parents taught me that ethics is relational, the world around me taught me that truth itself has more than one vantage point. Some of the most formative lessons came not from school or church, but from the quiet hours I spent with the Kaumātua next door. I didn’t grasp the significance of those conversations at the time. I was simply a child listening to stories — stories of Waitara, of Parihaka, of people whose experiences were absent from the official narratives I would later encounter in the classroom.
But something in me recognised, even then, that these stories were not “alternatives” to the truth. They were truths in their own right, shaped by a different history, a different memory, a different relationship to land and power. They revealed that the world looks different depending on where you stand, and that no single account can ever capture the whole of it.
Those early encounters planted a seed that has stayed with me throughout my life: the understanding that perspective is not a flaw in human perception but an inherent part of it. We do not see the world as it is; we see it through the lenses of our culture, our history, our experiences, and our place in the story. That realisation didn’t make me distrust truth — it made me wary of anyone who claimed to possess all of it.
It was in those moments, long before I had the language for it, that I began to understand why certainty feels so brittle to me. Not because conviction is wrong, but because certainty leaves no room for the truths that lie outside our own line of sight. The Kaumātua’s stories taught me that truth is not a single beam of light but a landscape — one that can only be glimpsed from many angles, none of them complete on their own.
In Part Two, I turn from these childhood experiences to the ways they continued to shape my adult life — in how I understood myself, how I navigated relationships, and how I learned to make sense of the world’s complexity.
