For me, / my love of debate / is inextricably tied / to a life that I've led of always moving countries. / I had to move from South Korea to Australia as an eight-year-old / without really speaking English. / And I quickly found / the hardest part of / crossing language lines, / of cultural lines was // disagreements / where people tend / to be more disruptive / to interrupt, / to speed up / and slow down. / In response to all that, / I resolved to / be very agreeable / in the way in which I presented at school, / and to / keep my thoughts / to myself. / The thing that changed that / was / I joined the debate team / off the strength of / one promise, / which was that in debate, / when one person speaks, / no one else does. //And to someone who had been / interrupted / and spun out of conversation, / that sounded to me like a kind of salvation. // If / intelligence is the / ability to respond to any argument, / wisdom lies in knowing which arguments to respond to, / and which parts of an argument to respond to. / Arguments are / easy to start / and hard to end / because / there are / any number of differences between two people. / And unless you are careful to say, / "We're having this disagreement at this moment and not / all the other disagreements we could be having," / all of the differences between two people / can start flooding in, / and the argument becomes this unruly mass where any of the potential sources of conflict can come to the fore, / and you're not making progress on any given one. //