Live Well Together
This morning I heard a half an hour an interview with an Irish priest (On Being) who has been running an institute for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland for a while. As always with those interviews, he was so articulate and clear with his words, I wanted to write them all down as fast as they were coming out, but I was on my back on the couch (feeling very decadent while a crew was madly unloading a full truckload of vegetables at Dupont Circle, bracing themselves for a very busy morning) and did not.
The words that rang the truest for me, at the end, were his assessment that our mission is to live well together. Not to agree, not to necessarily even believe the same things, but to live well together. This seems so fundamental that it almost should not need to be said. The reason it rang true is I have been pondering a problem we have here in our neighborhood. It is delicate and I don't want to say anything that would identify any players, really, but I am going to see whether I can lay out where we are these days. I will make up names, just for the fun of it.
Our neighborhood is founded on the ideals of neighborliness, of living well together. Most of the time, we manage. There are always issues that need working through and sometimes they take longer than anyone wants, but we generally find a way to get to a place of relative agreement. We always seem to have one or two neighbors who are swimming upstream, unable to see the same things that others see, and this takes more energy and time than all our successes combined.
The same thing happens everywhere, I know. In classrooms and work places and families, the people who cannot agree with the direction of the group, they cause a lot of blockage and emotional time. Even in our family that gets along pretty well with itself, we have spent hours and years finding ways to be inclusive of all the different modes. I can remember in particular how much time we spent on Stephen (his real name) while he was young and then while he was an adolescent. He never traveled between the lines (that is precisely how I think of my own father, so this is a characteristic we cherish as well as confront). Then Stephen took it upon himself to go away and see things from a different perspective, and to grow up some, and to think more about how all the pieces of his life fit together, and he came back with a fresh and lively way to be part of this life again. It has been a joy for all of us. As it happens, he went to school to learn about peace and transformation etc.
But here in our neighborhood we have one person who is deeply unhappy, but who would not characterize themselves that way (leaving gender out). Chris (not real name) appeared to be a cohousing type of person when they arrived, but gradually emerged as a fairly rigid and strongly defensive person. Has basically alienated most neighbors, but evidently still finds some reason to stay here in this weird environment. The amount of emotional energy that has been devoted to Chris is extraordinary -- both positive and negative. People have tried to have long and in depth conversations, people have lost their tempers, people have thrown up their hands and walked away. There is a community culture now of basically rejecting most of the viewpoints expressed by Chris. This troubles me, of course. I have been trying to imagine what I can do without getting sucked back into the vortex. For now my practice has been to delete all emails sent by Chris that are longer than a couple of sentences (they are generally much longer) because this becomes a pattern of attention that feels completely unproductive. It is a dementor situation. We need a therapist. This morning I began to think about just having tea with Chris to ask about their beginnings, to see if I can understand where this is all coming from. We are not able to diagnose people here, but people feel that there is a mental health issue. It is so much more than that, though, there is mean-ness and manipulation, there is lying, there is a story that keeps getting told over and over. Not sure at all what to do. But if we come from a place of love, which I hope we do, then we have to find the answer to how to live well together. This has been bubbling in my mind for a while now, and I think I need to try to take action again. I will not be able to solve this problem but I don't want to be a part of it either.
In my new life as a person who doesn't have to do all the work, I have time to think about stuff like this. The backs of my legs are complaining because even if I don't have to do all the work, I like to do some of it. I had an hour by myself planting beets by hand yesterday afternoon and now I remember what all the new workers feel like today. They are wondering if they will ever walk up and down stairs again without feeling like they are 100 years old. The only cure for that is to go back out and plant some more. That is my plan, so I can puzzle this out some more. I don't relish the idea of getting into it again with Chris (who I have stopped relating to except as needed), but the Irish priest would say that I must.
To step back a bit, I have to report that I have been bursting with joy about this April. It is so beautiful, so dramatic, so colorful. It makes me love my life and every single day. And we all feel like such good farmers because everything is happening on time, without struggle. The farmers on Instagram are bragging up a storm because they forget that nothing is within their control, they are just benefiting from a streak of gorgeous weather. We all are.
The words that rang the truest for me, at the end, were his assessment that our mission is to live well together. Not to agree, not to necessarily even believe the same things, but to live well together. This seems so fundamental that it almost should not need to be said. The reason it rang true is I have been pondering a problem we have here in our neighborhood. It is delicate and I don't want to say anything that would identify any players, really, but I am going to see whether I can lay out where we are these days. I will make up names, just for the fun of it.
Our neighborhood is founded on the ideals of neighborliness, of living well together. Most of the time, we manage. There are always issues that need working through and sometimes they take longer than anyone wants, but we generally find a way to get to a place of relative agreement. We always seem to have one or two neighbors who are swimming upstream, unable to see the same things that others see, and this takes more energy and time than all our successes combined.
The same thing happens everywhere, I know. In classrooms and work places and families, the people who cannot agree with the direction of the group, they cause a lot of blockage and emotional time. Even in our family that gets along pretty well with itself, we have spent hours and years finding ways to be inclusive of all the different modes. I can remember in particular how much time we spent on Stephen (his real name) while he was young and then while he was an adolescent. He never traveled between the lines (that is precisely how I think of my own father, so this is a characteristic we cherish as well as confront). Then Stephen took it upon himself to go away and see things from a different perspective, and to grow up some, and to think more about how all the pieces of his life fit together, and he came back with a fresh and lively way to be part of this life again. It has been a joy for all of us. As it happens, he went to school to learn about peace and transformation etc.
But here in our neighborhood we have one person who is deeply unhappy, but who would not characterize themselves that way (leaving gender out). Chris (not real name) appeared to be a cohousing type of person when they arrived, but gradually emerged as a fairly rigid and strongly defensive person. Has basically alienated most neighbors, but evidently still finds some reason to stay here in this weird environment. The amount of emotional energy that has been devoted to Chris is extraordinary -- both positive and negative. People have tried to have long and in depth conversations, people have lost their tempers, people have thrown up their hands and walked away. There is a community culture now of basically rejecting most of the viewpoints expressed by Chris. This troubles me, of course. I have been trying to imagine what I can do without getting sucked back into the vortex. For now my practice has been to delete all emails sent by Chris that are longer than a couple of sentences (they are generally much longer) because this becomes a pattern of attention that feels completely unproductive. It is a dementor situation. We need a therapist. This morning I began to think about just having tea with Chris to ask about their beginnings, to see if I can understand where this is all coming from. We are not able to diagnose people here, but people feel that there is a mental health issue. It is so much more than that, though, there is mean-ness and manipulation, there is lying, there is a story that keeps getting told over and over. Not sure at all what to do. But if we come from a place of love, which I hope we do, then we have to find the answer to how to live well together. This has been bubbling in my mind for a while now, and I think I need to try to take action again. I will not be able to solve this problem but I don't want to be a part of it either.
In my new life as a person who doesn't have to do all the work, I have time to think about stuff like this. The backs of my legs are complaining because even if I don't have to do all the work, I like to do some of it. I had an hour by myself planting beets by hand yesterday afternoon and now I remember what all the new workers feel like today. They are wondering if they will ever walk up and down stairs again without feeling like they are 100 years old. The only cure for that is to go back out and plant some more. That is my plan, so I can puzzle this out some more. I don't relish the idea of getting into it again with Chris (who I have stopped relating to except as needed), but the Irish priest would say that I must.
To step back a bit, I have to report that I have been bursting with joy about this April. It is so beautiful, so dramatic, so colorful. It makes me love my life and every single day. And we all feel like such good farmers because everything is happening on time, without struggle. The farmers on Instagram are bragging up a storm because they forget that nothing is within their control, they are just benefiting from a streak of gorgeous weather. We all are.
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