Today, as I read the news, I glanced down at the pen I call my tolerance pen and picked up my phone to call my 85-year-old German friend, R. I've been sitting with what I've been seeing around the world lately: a seeming loss of the capacity to treat people with dignity and respect, regardless of what they look like, whether they think like us, or agree with us. I needed a reminder of R, and the lesson her father, Herr K, left her.

I met R when I landed at the airport in Germany nearly 25 years ago. She'd volunteered to help international students like me find their footing, and she welcomed me with her trademark warmth and energy, so that I almost forgot I was in a foreign land. She could easily have put me into a box with all the labels of "otherness" on offer: different nationality, different ethnicity, different language, different accent (even in German), different food preferences. Instead she welcomed me in, and over the next few years shared with me something her own father had taught her.

He'd been a prisoner of war in an Allied camp after World War Two. He came home and told his young daughter: "The world needs tolerance." Not as a slogan, but as something he'd earned the hard way. "He was a loving and kind man," R told me, "the life of the party, very funny. So one day when he sat me down and said this with great seriousness, I knew it was important."

The pen pictured is her family's gift to me on my university graduation. A beautiful signifier but the true gift was so much more.

What R practised is something I feel we need more than ever now, whether we're headed off on holiday, seeing new people move in next door, or doing business somewhere unfamiliar. She taught me, first by what she did and then by what she said, the value of blurring the "them" and "us" long enough to recognise that we're all human with needs, wants, and something worth sharing.

Over the years she introduced me to home-cooked German food, the difference between kuchen and torte, and the wisdom of a digestive walk after both. She made sure I knew which herbal teas I needed for which cold symptoms, and after my initial bewilderment of not having the equivalent of Panadol multi-symptom at my finger tips, my medicine cabinet soon showed expertise in the full Bad Heilbrunner range. She told me her family's history and taught me a little Plattdeutsch, which I feel is a lot closer to English and would probably have expedited my German language progression.

But it went both ways. She learned about Trini macaroni pie, green seasoning, curried crab (arguably the best way to eat said crustacean), and black cake. I told her about the history behind our unique Carnival, the traditional characters, music and dances. I made sure she heard about the Caribbean that lies beyond the sun, sea, and sand, and we had honest conversations about colonialism, slavery, indentureship and relentless cycles of poverty.

We shared a love of classical music. A piece of me still lives in the Trinidadian wind chimes in her kitchen. A piece of her lives with me in the pen she gave me.

This is the muscle I think we're at risk of atrophying: the small, daily choice to see difference and lean in rather than away.

R lived tolerance. She was a steady presence for several students, from Turkey, Romania, Pakistan, India, Trinidad and Tobago, and the USA, and would often share with me something that struck her as unique about new traditions and practices. One day she laughed at how tricky it was to plan a meal for a group of us: she'd thought about bratwurst, but the Muslim friend couldn't eat pork, then bolognese, but the Hindu friend couldn't eat beef, and she landed on chicken schnitzel, happy to find something everyone could enjoy. She never spoke from a position of superiority or the awe that accompanies exoticism, but from her firm belief that something underneath everything unites us as human beings.

I recently learned that Trinidad and Tobago, my country of birth, is the only country with official national watchwords, and tolerance is one of them. It's one of those odd ones that is equally real and aspirational. But watching the world right now, I think both the country's first Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams, and R's father had it right. It's large and small at once, complex and diverse, threaded through with things that connect us and things that separate us, all of us sharing one planet. When Sahara dust settles on windscreens in Hungary and on houses in Trinidad, it doesn't know or respect a border.

More and more, the ability to hear an opposing point of view from a different religion, a different ethnic group, a different economic bracket, a different political affiliation, a different parenting approach, a different type of neurodivergence and still see a fellow human being, seems hard to sustain.

Tolerance requires the will and the effort, from a position that assumes positive intent. But the alternative with its discord, disrespect, and lack of humanity, makes it worth the effort.