For a few days in June, Billy and I ate breakfast at the same café. It’s in the working-class neighborhood of Dublin where I was staying for the annual conference of the International Listening Association. I only knew Billy’s name because someone shouted a good-morning to him in the street, the way people do in that neighborhood.

Billy was very old and stooped and evidently near blind. He held his morning paper an inch from his face. We had only one interaction, and I won’t soon forget it.

That morning I wanted to catch up on some news, so after ordering my Irish breakfast (a carnivore’s delight) I looked through the papers on the front counter and picked up the Irish Times. From what I could tell, it’s a solid newspaper, with good in-depth reporting. I turned to go back to my table, which required me to walk past Billy.

He sort of growled at me.

I’m not sure whether it was his diction, his accent, or my hearing loss, but I could not make head nor tail of what he was saying. He said more and, while doing so, pushed his newspaper toward me. The proprietor gently informed me that he wanted me to take the paper, so I did.

It was the Irish Mirror.

The Irish Mirror is a tabloid, with stories often associated with tabloids. There was a news item on the Taoiseach (the head of Ireland’s government) on the front, and then page after page of celebrity news and local murders and what beaches to visit and a great sports section in the back.

This is the sort of paper I don’t pick up when I want to catch up on world news. Yet there was Billy with his hand outstretched, maybe trying to say, “You don’t want to be reading that liberal trash in the Times. Here. Here’s a good paper.”

I wasn’t about to refuse Billy’s offer, so I took his Mirror. And I couldn’t help grinning to myself as I walked back to my table, because Billy had retaught me an important lesson in dialogue.

Here’s the lesson: if I want to understand people who disagree with me, I have to read their newspapers. Or watch their TV news. Or check their internet sources. When I do, several things happen. I get a deeper glimpse into the way they think. Often I find that their opinions make sense within their own worldview.

And sometimes, I find that their opinions make sense to me—or at least I can imagine a “reasonable person” thinking the same things. All of a sudden my mind, and my heart, are just a little more open to them.

That openness of mind and heart, of course, is exactly what’s missing from our American public square. Imagine what might happen if millions of us had more of these Billy moments, or at least were open to them. How far could we go in healing the rifts and bridging the divides that are damaging our country so?