David Daniel lives in Brunswick.

A recent op-ed urging us to “stop shouting and start listening” named something many of us feel in our bones. Beneath the noise and outrage, most people do want the same basic things: dignity, security, belonging and a future that still feels livable. That recognition matters. It reminds us that division is not our natural state, even when it feels overwhelming.

But if shared values alone were enough to hold us together, we wouldn’t be here. What if the deeper problem isn’t that we’ve forgotten how to care — but that we’ve lost the inner capacity to stay present when care is most required? Fear narrows attention. Stress hardens certainty. In moments of threat, even well-intentioned people stop listening, not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t.

Here in Maine, we pride ourselves on neighborliness and plain-spoken honesty. We show up when storms knock out power. We check on one another through long winters. Yet even here, conversations at school board meetings and town halls and in online forums have grown more brittle. Familiar disagreements harden faster than they used to. That should give us pause.

We tend to treat listening as a virtue — something good people simply choose to do. But anyone who has tried to stay open during a heated disagreement knows that listening is also physiological and psychological. When emotions spike, the body shifts into defense. Attention collapses. Thoughts race. Certainty becomes a kind of armor. In that state, curiosity feels unsafe, and empathy disappears not out of malice, but out of overload.

This helps explain a paradox of our time: why people who share similar hopes for dignity, security and belonging still find themselves locked in cycles of misunderstanding and mistrust. The issue is not a shortage of shared values. It is a shortage of capacity — the ability to pause, notice our reactions and choose how we respond instead of being driven by them.

We train relentlessly for physical demands. We don’t expect someone to haul traps, work a mill shift or clear a driveway after a nor’easter without preparation. Yet we ask ordinary citizens to do something equally demanding — to listen carefully, think clearly and hold complexity under stress — with almost no training at all. We assume these capacities will simply appear when we need them most.

They don’t.

What’s missing is something I’ve come to think of as mental fitness: the practiced ability to notice a thought without immediately believing it, to slow down when emotions speed up, and to hold more than one perspective without collapsing into certainty. These are not abstract ideals. They are practical skills, and like any skill, they improve with practice.

Consider how often public conversations fail not because people disagree on policy, but because they cannot stay present long enough to understand what the other person is actually saying. A town meeting devolves into shouting. A workplace conversation hardens into camps. A family gathering ends in silence. In each case, the breakdown happens before problem-solving can even begin.

Mental fitness doesn’t tell us what to think, and it doesn’t favor one ideology over another. What it does is create the inner space required for genuine dialogue — the space to say, “I may disagree with you, but I’m still listening.” Without that space, calls for empathy feel like moral pressure. With it, empathy becomes possible.

This is where the call to “stop shouting and start listening” becomes actionable rather than aspirational. Listening is not just a personal virtue; it is a civic skill. And like any civic infrastructure, it requires investment — not only in institutions, but in ourselves.

Democracy has always depended on more than good intentions. It depends on citizens capable of staying in a relationship under strain. If we want a future shaped by conversation rather than contempt — here in Maine and beyond — then mental fitness can no longer be treated as a private concern. It is part of the shared work of citizenship itself.

We can keep asking people to listen harder — or we can finally give ourselves the tools to do it.