Conflict!!! Run!!!

My mother always told me that where there are people there are conflicts. I can’t quite tell if her saying is true, because I don’t work with lots of people. I write at home or spend time with my kids. I’m friendly with many but have a deep friendship with only a few. I am conflict-averse. A peace-maker.

In the past few years, however, conflict chased me. I got divorced, and though I worked hard to establish peace, my efforts only brought more strife. I began to wonder if avoiding conflict might not be the best idea in the long run.

Today I find myself again in the center of conflict. The details matter little. It’s the entire idea of conflict that I dislike. I am badly prepared to recognize disagreement. I take people’s words as they sound, rather than discerning facial expressions or gestures that would alert a more observant person than I. I have too much belief in being able to mollify, and am continually surprised when people aren’t. And feeling so unprepared, I wonder, could I learn how to have a fight?

Some years ago, a friend recommended a continuing studies class at Stanford called Interpersonal Communication. In the class, groups of twelve men and women met to discuss how people see each other, react to each other, how their methods of speaking work.

As normal for me, I was quiet in the class, rarely participating. One woman told me bluntly that I was a flake. I didn’t know what “flake” means and had to look it up. I did not engage in conflict with her over this accusation, nor did I talk much with anyone in the class. Except, I found a friend, an Iranian man as quiet as I, who I sometimes meet till today.

Perhaps I could learn in this lifetime how and when to engage in conflict. But maybe a better idea for me would be to embrace my peace-making nature. And yes, perhaps peace-making will irritate people and cause conflict, but if I remain true to myself and my good intentions, surely everything will eventually fall into place and come right?

In the book I’m reading by Alon Hilu, Nadav, the soldier, is on his way home for a weekend. At a bus stop he looks up at the sky and invites peace and love into his life. As he stands there, feeling his heart open and soar to the clouds, a heavy hand falls on his shoulder. It is the military police, and Nadav is fined 1000 shekels for shoes that are not clean enough.

The world is strange, is it not? A box of chocolates, and we never know what we’re going to get. I feel sad about this new conflict, but maybe in ten years I will look back and there’ll be some aspect of it that I can seize on and say: It was for the best, and now it’s done.

The Golden Key of Thoughts

The last few roller coaster months have shown me a gloomy view of my ability to handle difficult situations. I lack resilience, I’ve decided, and I set out to find how this important quality could be learned. Resilience is defined in the dictionary as the “ability to recover readily from illness, depression or adversity.” But resilience allows us to do more than just bounce back to a normal state of functioning: it enables us to use the experience to become stronger. Remember my blog about falling in the hole? I tend to fall in the same hole again and again, and worse, once inside, I sit there and bewail my bad luck rather than work to find the way out.

I was enthralled, therefore, when I encountered words of wisdom in the somewhat bizarre new Alon Hilu novel, As Far As It Gets. The novel tells the story of an uncle and a nephew, Michael and Nadav. Michael inherits $70,000 and leaves Israel to travel around the world, spending the money on giving other people joy. Almost on the same day as his uncle leaves, Nadav enlists in the IDF and is having a hard time fitting in. In one of his letters to Nadav, Michael attempts to cheer him up: “You have freedom, true freedom which is not just another truth but the ultimate truth for all humanity, the freedom to awaken in you -- always, in every situation, even in the midst of despair, sorrow and anger, and despite all the pain and suffering you endure -- good thoughts and wonderful feelings like love! Hope! Mercy!” And in the next paragraph Michael continues: “Your strength is in your thoughts, in your imagination, and they are with you wherever you go.”

Thoughts, Michael implies, are the source of resilience! They are the rope for escaping the hole! Finding that optimistic, grateful thread of thoughts is the way out of wallowing in a bad situation. I wonder if this is always true. Is the power of my thoughts the ultimate solution to falling in holes? And I think: how amazing! If I could master this golden key, I would no longer need to fear making mistakes, and I could choose to walk in any street I want, whether well-paved or not.

Of course, it is easier said than done. Sometimes when I feel sad I cannot find in myself the energy to create joy out of sorrow or thankfulness out of pain. I make the choice to stay in my trouble hole and roll around in the dirt of my self pity. And even though my first thought is one of disgust at choosing to thus waste my time, I could perhaps give myself permission to feel suffering, at least for a while. Because after that wallowing in the dirt at the bottom of the hole, the outside is so much more beautiful and grand. And remember, I now own the magic key for getting out.