The Amish don’t rush decisions or talk too much about them, so I’m trying to move at their pace, which is not natural to me.

It was nearly 100 degrees up here today, and I stopped on the way from my foot surgery, thinking I might catch Moise resting in the heat, which was a foolish idea.

He was out working, and since I couldn’t walk out where he was, I showed some of my cart illumination test results to Barbara and two of the children.

Barbara was interested to see my test results but did not comment.

This is Moise’s ground, and she wasn’t going to intrude on it.

If she had any strong thoughts about the images, she didn’t share them. I wasn’t expecting her to, but as someone who loved negotiations when I was on TV and the media, I thought it wouldn’t do any harm in case they really liked what they saw.

I told Barbara it sometimes felt like Moise and I were two bulls facing one another across a field, even though I knew this wasn’t the Amish way. She laughed, “I bet you’re having some fun, too,” she said. I admitted it.

I had the sense he might be having fun too. He’s spent much of his life fighting for the Amish way.

I was a good negotiator trained by some of the toughest and best negotiators in the television industry, but none of my lessons applied here.

This was a negotiation that I need to see as a conversation, not a test of wills or wits.

My boundary  line is clear:

If Mosie isn’t comfortable with the idea of different illumination tapes, that would be the end of my involvement.

But he has had several opportunities to end this discussion, and he has left the door open, so I’ll keep going.

A good negotiation would use the big boot on my foot for some advantage, but I have to stop thinking that way.

This is not like any negotiation or conversation I’ve had before. Not only is it new to me, but it is also dependent on my not being me.

The thing about this writing that I love the most is that I feel myself growing and learning.

I’m not using what I know; I’m learning what I don’t know.

Two things come to mind this week that bears sharing.

One is the idea of sacrifice, which is central to this conversation.

As a history buff, I’ve read many stories about the sacrifices Americans have made to keep the idea of freedom and democracy alive – the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, the Civil War, the World Wars, and the wars that have raged for decades in Asia and Southeast Asia – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

I think about the sacrifices African-Americans have made, and Jews and so many Muslims.

Millions of Americans have given their lives for the causes they believed in, from country to freedom to  religion.

But we are not in an age of sacrifice; many of the same people who shed so much blood for our democracy seem to be done with it and are taking up arms and fighting to damage or destroy it. And all for a man so unworthy of them.

The Amish are very different. Their passion for their values is strong enough to feel and touch.

Like us for so many years, they believe deeply and fervently about their faith and are willing to sacrifice blood and treasure to keep their way of life.

That seems to be the toughest thing for outsiders to grasp. We’ve lost the idea of it, of sacrifice. So many of us don’t seem to believe in things.; the list of things we hate seems to grow.

The Amish families understand the horror of losing a child and are devoted to being good to people,  but the English, as they call us,  no longer accept or quite grasp the idea of sacrifice.

People tend to think it is almost insane, even unfathomable, to risk life and limb over the color of a buggy.

That is perhaps the biggest gap of understanding that exists between the Amish world the English world.

People e-mail me all the time bewildered at the idea that they wouldn’t leap at the idea of sparing their families and others from injury; it seems to make no sense to them. It’s hard for us to see plain buggies as a sacred symbol.

This is also the biggest challenge to me in the discussions I’m having with Moise; I don’t want to minimize or challenge his beliefs, so my work is to respect them and find the line between connecting and rushing past him or beyond his community’s values, honed and cherished for hundreds of years.

In my world, negotiations were never so delicate or respectful.  It was mostly about assaulting and undermine one’s beliefs, not respecting them.

Success was getting the other to give up what they felt was right.

These people, the Amish, are not divided, quarreling, or cynical; they are not exhausted by the demands of their community or sick of what it asks of them. That is a wonder to me. So yes, they really are different.

John Kennedy ask Americans to ask what they could do for their country; the Amish are willing to give everything for their country.

I can’t challenge that with the strip idea; I can only hope to reinforce it.

Obviously, and as a parent, I have a different idea about security and safety. But the Amish I am meeting do many things better, more creatively and successfully than I do.

I am slowly but steadily losing the common reflex: that we are somehow better, more advanced, richer, and wiser than they are.

It’s ironic, humility is important to them, but it seems I’m the one who is learning to be humble.

Believe me, I am losing that reflex of judgment more and more each day.

Most of the time, Moise and his family are teaching me things I don’t know. I’m not teaching them much that they need to know.

Unlike so many people who message me, sometimes angrily, I don’t feel justified in judging them or thinking I know better than they do what they should do, how they should live.

That’s a big change from my views on the Amish before I knew any or did any homework or research.

Their kindness gets to me all the time. Every time I visit the farm, one or the other children or Barbara or Moise offers their services to help us stack the firewood in our back yard.

They are ready in a moment to come clop-clopping down their hill to stack our firewood to thank us for welcoming them and helping them.

“A+ on the process, but it’s a bit too early to declare that anything more than a nice discussion was achieved,” posted one reader about our conversations here.

Don’t I know it. I’ve never suggested otherwise.

I’m not sure the conversations are nice; they are meaningful and sometimes powerful. I make no predictions about success or failure.

It just feels like the right thing to do; I’m trying to keep my ego free of obsessing with the outcome.

The process is forcing me to change.

I’ve learned a lot from the Millers, but I don’t know much more than I know.

I have no sound way of guessing or even wanting to guess what Moise will decide. Oddly, I’m not invested in it.

I’m determined to make a good case for him to consider using those very powerful illumination strips to make the carts more visible on the road. The boundary is this: when I make my case, my involvement is over.

It must be their decision; it is not mine.

That is what respect is. And I do respect Moise. I could never accomplish in a lifetime what he has managed to accomplish in months. I’m dazzled by it.

Four or five lovely and generous people wanted to send money and pay for the illumination tapes.

I find this heartwarming and interesting. There is the assumption, among many, that the Amish need money or donations, that they are so different that they must be poor.

The Amish do not need money, from what I see. And if they do, they get it from one another or the church, not from us.

They are shrewd, creative, and hardworking business people, they’ve been selling things for centuries, and they have it down.

They build their own and each other’s homes, sell lumber, pay each other’s hospital bills, make sheds and garden beds and furniture, pies, donuts, cookies, do all kinds of home and handiwork, are excellent builders, plan more than 75 different kinds of fruit and vegetables, and own enough land to sell a great deal of it.

They hire themselves out all the time.

They don’t accept donations of money; they consider it almost offensive. They are fiercely self-sustaining and unsparingly independent.

So we’ll see. With Moise’s approval, I am committed to sharing the process as honestly and sensitively as I can. I’m getting about one nasty attack a day, way down from the last month. I think I’m just wearing them down.

Moise and I do share one value. We don’t quit.

Some feminists understandably can’t get past the idea of the Amish Church as a Patriarchy or Mosie as a Patriarch. They insist his family – especially the women – is being coerced or oppressed.

These people care nothing for me and know nothing about me.

They are not interested in having a conversation with me or listening to me. But the Patriarch is. How did our world get turned upside down?

Other people are upset that I’m writing about the Amish or taking any kinds of photographs. There’s a difference between people being humble and people being shy. These people are not shy.

The message that keeps coming back to me, the lesson so far, is that we are all different. The angry people are different.  The curious people are different. The Amish people are different. I’m different.

In their world, it’s fine to be different. In our world, it isn’t. We seem to be hating each other rather than listening; empathy is pleading for its life.

When all is said and done, that might be what the lesson of the illumination tapes is really about.

I hope Moise can hear me.

I hope I can hear him.

The really wonderful news for me is that neither of us has quit on the other.