My sister came to visit me last weekend. It was the first time in a long time, she lives in Northern California, and I was thrilled to have her here. We ate great food, we shopped, we watched the San Francisco 49ers, my sister’s favorite football team (they won!), we laughed and talked about everything.
It wasn’t always this way with us. We used to fight a lot when we were kids. She was three and a half years older than I was and she would taunt me until I was so frustrated, I’d hit her. And still, she always protected me. Our parents were sorely lacking in the emotions department and no matter what happened, my sister was always there.
As we grew up, she and I became estranged. We didn’t have a fight but we had different goals, we lived different lifestyles, and we lived in different cities. We didn’t speak the same language, but over the years, we both did a lot of work on ourselves. We wanted to get along and we were inching back toward each other when my mother
died. My father had died twenty years earlier and my sister and I came together in a new way. We had no fights over who would get what and we came out of it closer than ever.
Today, we are each other’s best support person. We learned how to listen to each other and we learned how to speak up. We practiced being kind to each other. We had some false starts, we had some disagreements that were hard to work out but we both wanted to fix them and we did. Now, we take good care of each other and we love being together.
Here is an Aesop’s fable about being
different and getting along:
Dwelling in a hot dry land, there was a big lion, the King of all the animals, and a very strong boar. There was only one pond in this hot
place and one day, the lion and the boar were very thirsty and they came to the pond at the same time. Both of them wanted to drink first. Neither of them wanted to wait. The lion showed his teeth and boar showed his tusks. They started to fight and kicked up a big cloud of dust.
They fought hard for a long time but neither of them won. When they stopped for a moment to catch their breaths, they saw vultures flying
in the air above them. These birds were watching the fight, ready to swoop down and eat the loser. The lion and the boar realized that their fighting was attracting the vultures. They also realized that fighting wouldn’t help them drink water and assuage their thirst. They stopped fighting and drank water together in peace. The vultures flew away. Now that the lion and the boar were friends,
they knew they had made made the right choice to share instead of fight. The moral of the story: It’s better to compromise than to fight and destroy each other.
In the Buddhist tradition, conflict is not a battle to be won but rather an experience for growth. Underneath the battling and accusations is some form of insecurity, fear, the need to be right or a lack of communication skills. If we can drop the desire for revenge, if we can listen to each other and see what’s behind the rage, we can stop fueling the fires of anger and start finding solutions.
There are always solutions if we take the time to slow down and find them. When a friend of mine was dying of AIDS in the 1980s, he asked all the people he was having problems with to come to the hospital and make peace. He didn’t want to die with unfinished business. It was inspirational and I decided to do the same thing right then instead of waiting until I was dying. To this day, I make sure that when a call or a visit is over, there are no loose ends. I’ve said what I wanted to say, I’ve listened to what someone else wants to say and there would be no regrets if this was the last time I saw that person. You just never know if we’re having our last day
or if we have decades ahead of us.
It takes courage and commitment to stop fighting. When you turn to mediation, that doesn’t mean that one person gets what they want while the other one gets nothing. When you walk away from
mediation, everyone gave up something and got something. That’s what meeting in the middle means. If you can develop the great skill of looking at a situation from someone else’s point of view, if you can meet them where they are, you can find a way to resolve a situation without fighting and becoming defensive. There is a famous Native American proverb:
“Never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.”
Sometimes fighting can be nothing more than a bad habit, a familiar way to communicate. But it doesn’t bring peace, even if you win. When you fight with someone and no one backs down, there are no winners. When you let go and search for solutions, everybody wins.
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