I rarely watch the news. I skim the periphery of current events because I find the details and images too disturbing.

They leave me grappling with how to stay positive in a world seemingly filled with grief and aggression. So why CNN was on last Thursday I don’t know.

The horror struck like a punch to the throat; I was thrown into panic. My son spends July in France with his father, often in the south for two weeks. We speak every few days but could they have gone without mentioning it? Could they have been in that crowd?

Logic told me it wasn’t likely but it was a tormented night until I got confirmation they were safe.

But as I sobbed with relief that it wasn’t my child … I realised they were all somebody’s.

It is so easy to “other” people — to categorise and label them, to separate ourselves and distance them from us. We “other” people with our words and actions and create beliefs about our “othering”.

We do it to make ourselves feel safe or significant or right, and sometimes just to cope with the magnitude of things. Words such as: Muslims, westerners, immigrants, whites, blacks, expats, homosexuals, churchgoers, gang members, foreigners, west side/east side, tramps, victims are all words that can be used to “other” someone else.

Grouped together, these “others” are a faceless mass and it is easy to fear them, point fingers, lay blame, hate, reject, build walls against, expel, bomb, shoot, victimise, deny, ignore … So much atrocity has been committed through the “othering” of people in one form or another.

And still continues.

I despair that so many current political and public choices are being influenced by this same “othering” that has brought us here.

Instead of this arm’s-length view, what if we focused in?

What happens when we consider the individual?

Recognise each person as the family member/friend contributing breathing, feeling, vulnerable, human being that they are, not so dissimilar to ourselves. It restores our humanity. Would it be so easy to write off, dismiss or murder people if we recognised them for who they are, someone like us, rather than some “other” thing we think they are?

I realise governments are dealing with huge scales, but on our scale as individuals can we perhaps try to see other individuals?

Can we throw in a little more love and compassion and respect into our judgments of others?

Can we start to look more for our similarities than our differences?

“Otherness” dissolves when we discover sameness — and we are all in the same boat, trying to do our best with what we have and what we know.

Fear and scarcity thinking can arise, but if we keep asking ourselves, what is the loving, kind, benevolent thing to do?, we will keep coming back to our humanity.

Perhaps there will always be horrors in the news, but the more we cultivate peace, acceptance and community right here in our own backyards, the more we will influence that upwards, and the more we can remain positive in spite of it all.

Julia Pitt is a trained success coach and certified NLP practitioner on the team at Benedict Associates. For further information contact Julia on 705-7488, www.juliapittcoaching.com.