Just as children are astonished to discover potatoes buried in the ground the first time they dig in the garden, I’ve heard there are real people who, on their first airplane flights, have been shocked—shocked!—at the absence of lines differentiating one state from the other. Yes. Strong, black, permanent-marker-type lines like they’ve seen on road maps or in textbooks.

I’ve been thinking about boundaries—those demarcations that set us apart. Some are real: canyon ledges, rock cliff faces. Who would want to take that next step into the abyss?

Rivers are demarcations. They divide one piece of land from another, and sometimes (but not always) rivers are used to set boundaries. Even so, they’re usually crossable by one means or another.

But other boundaries are completely artificial. Humanmade. Political, legal, emotional. Some are good to have. Some, not so much.

One of our neighbor families once owned the acreage where we now live—for a very long time—before having to sell it off to pay health care expenses. I’m sure it was a painful decision. They’d sold to someone else, who then sold to us. One day a year or two after we’d moved, we came upon the matriarch of the ‘first family’ hunched over our wild blackberry patch like a furtive hooded monk. She figured we wouldn’t mind her picking those blackberries, she said, to make jelly—like she always had.

She knew she was overstepping boundaries. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have looked up at us like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. But she was ready with her passive-aggressive defense, suggesting that by prior ownership, she now had squatter’s rights. She did not respect our boundaries.

Plenty has been said about personal boundaries of late, with much more eloquence than I can offer. Let it be said that they deserve respect, too.

But what I worry about is the tribalism which we’ve allowed to create artificial boundaries, rivalries that erupt based on nothing more than an accident of birth, or where one’s parents transferred for work once upon a time, or where we went to school, or simple indoctrination. That sort of thing.

It bothers me, this “We live in the best [fill in the blank],” or, “My [blank] is the best” mentality. We use this blanket superlative whether talking about our schools, our communities, countries, spiritual beliefs, or ‘our’ teams. How can we possibly know ours is the best? I certainly can’t; I’ve not experienced all the others, even superficially. Has anyone?

I’m pretty place-bound. I’m at home with what I know. I appreciate the landscape around me, the people who surround me, my heritage. Traditions built from shared experiences help bind us together in ways that help us through times both easy and hard.

But don’t all people everywhere have every bit as strong a claim on pride of place as I have? Don’t I need to understand and honor their natural pride without proclaiming mine is the better, the best, and possibly the only, way?

Is it arrogance that makes us believe such things? Or ignorance? Or both? Isn’t there a better way to live in this world we share? A more thoughtful, generous way?

When I travel across a single state, I may move from salt water and a flat, sand-covered topography to densely green mountains, from arid desert to lush wetlands. Yet, as I step across the imaginary line between my state and its neighbor, I neither see nor feel anything magical taking place to set one apart from the other. Except for a green metal road sign, I wouldn’t know. The terrain is the same. Why should I imagine there’s something completely unique about my side of the boundary?

Can any lasting good come from this cutting ourselves off from otherness? How can it build understanding and goodwill? And if we don’t want to build those things among our fellow humans, what do we want?