Today it’s very easy to ignore the other side. People naturally gravitate to those who share similar values or ideas. Circles can quickly devolve to echo chambers, without few novel ideas or challenging beliefs. The internet has definitely strengthened this metamorphosis, actively and passively. For any weird opinion, you can actively find many sympathetic viewpoints in anything from internet forums to youtube videos to fringe news sites. The passive side is a less overt. Most social media websites will read your interactions as filters and applying them to your newsfeed. What you agree with, you see more of; what you disagree with gets hidden. Facebook is exceedingly good at this, building the echo chamber deeper.

But that isn’t necessarily beneficial. You learn most from a suite of ideas and having your thoughts challenged broadly. College is a cited as a good example of this, where having a collection of diverse and independent thinking individuals forces friction and grinds sharper wits and broader thinking.

I am particularly drawn to a quote from Fahrenheit 451 from the Professor to Montag.

“[W]hen I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a find cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”

You’re simply ignorant of different view point until you’re exposed to them. And it’s that constant exposure that allows you to think complexly about situations and use empathy to understand other people.

So I have to express my deep gratitude to my teammates, from grade school until college, for being the anvil that forged my cutting edge. It’s the vast different personalities pushed together in the combined crucible of endless laps of the pool, 6AM lifts, and cruel drylands that made me a better person and I cannot express my true thankfulness that I had my teammates to share that with.

Let me clarify. I’m a weirdo. My interest range from deep analysis of economic and political policy, to books from any genre, to puns. And I wasn’t exactly coy about my opinions; leading me too often to be the butt of the jokes. It’s not necessary to point out; I wouldn’t be the most popular kid on the team and I didn’t give myself many opportunities to change that.

And many of my teammates wouldn’t be in my social groups in normal situations. We simply had different values. And frankly, I didn’t like all of them all of the time. But I did learn from all of them. I was exposed to people I wouldn’t normal be friends with, but they challenged me. They pushed me outside my comfort zone. They showed me different perspectives.

By working with them, talking (or arguing) with them, and most importantly, listening to them, I became a better person. I practiced empathy, listening, and even sharpened my own arguments.

I wrote this entire piece to simply say thank you and try to put down on paper my true appreciation for those varied and different people I was lucky enough to call my teammates, and people I’m grateful to still call my friends. Thanks all.