A while ago I shared a quote from the prescient 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill who said:

“It is hardly possible to overrate the value…of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar…Such communication has always been, and is particularly in the present age one of the primary sources of progress.”

So as I write this email (bearing in mind you're probably getting it in your inbox a good while after I write it) I'm stuck in the airport terminal in Newark after the weather and various screw-ups by United Airlines have left me waiting desperately to get home a day or so later than planned. A first-world problem, I realise.

Anyway, sitting whiling away the hours with a few beers, I end up chatting to Vito for no other reason than he recognised my accent as British. 

We talked about many things, as travellers stuck somewhere they don't really want to be often do. Vito runs the export business of an Italian food manufacturer so is on the road quite often to the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and Japan. 

And as I headed away from the bar to type this email before (hopefully) boarding, I realised that Vito is just like so many travellers I've met over the years: open minded and tolerant. 

It doesn't matter what your background, what kind or problems you've had or challenges you've faced, meeting other people from other cultures is incontrovertibly a good thing.

And the same applies to anyone with different ideas from you. rather than shutting off our social media feeds so we only hear voices we agree with, the voices that do us good are the voices we don't agree with. No matter what side of the political or any other spectrum we're from, “meeting” people different from us makes us better.

How are you making sure you're meeting different people?