My sister came to visit me last\u00a0weekend. It was the first time in a long time, she lives in Northern\u00a0California, and I was thrilled to have her here. We ate great food, we shopped,\u00a0we watched the San Francisco 49ers, my sister\u2019s favorite football team (they\u00a0won!), we laughed and talked about everything.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t always this way with us.\u00a0We used to fight a lot when we were kids. She was three and a half years older\u00a0than I was and she would taunt me until I was so frustrated, I\u2019d hit her. And\u00a0still, she always protected me. Our parents were sorely lacking in the emotions\u00a0department and no matter what happened, my sister was always there.<\/p>\n
As we grew up, she and I became\u00a0estranged. We didn\u2019t have a fight but we had different goals, we lived\u00a0different lifestyles, and we lived in different cities. We didn\u2019t speak the\u00a0same language, but over the years, we both did a lot of work on ourselves. We\u00a0wanted 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\u00a0in a new way. We had no fights over who would get what and we came out of it closer than ever.<\/p>\n
Today, we are each other\u2019s best\u00a0support person. We learned how to listen to each other and we learned how to speak\u00a0up. We practiced being kind to each other. We had some false starts, we had\u00a0some disagreements that were hard to work out but we both wanted to fix them\u00a0and we did. Now, we take good care of each other and we love being together.<\/p>\n
Here is an Aesop\u2019s fable about being
different and getting along:<\/p>\n
Dwelling in a hot dry land, there was a big lion, the King\u00a0of 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\u00a0pond at the same time. Both of them wanted to drink first. Neither of them\u00a0wanted to wait. The lion showed his teeth and boar showed his tusks. They\u00a0started to fight and kicked up a big cloud of dust.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0and eat the loser. The lion and the boar realized that their fighting was attracting\u00a0the vultures. They also realized that fighting wouldn\u2019t help them drink water\u00a0and assuage their thirst. They stopped fighting and drank water together in\u00a0peace. 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.\u00a0The moral of the story: It\u2019s better to\u00a0compromise than to fight and destroy each other.<\/p>\n
In the Buddhist tradition, conflict\u00a0is not a battle to be won but rather an experience for growth. Underneath the battling\u00a0and accusations is some form of insecurity, fear, the need to be right or a\u00a0lack of communication skills. If we can drop the desire for revenge, if we can\u00a0listen to each other and see what\u2019s behind the rage, we can stop fueling the\u00a0fires of anger and start finding solutions.<\/p>\n
There are always solutions if we\u00a0take the time to slow down and find them. When a friend of mine was dying of\u00a0AIDS in the 1980s, he asked all the people he was having problems with to come\u00a0to the hospital and make peace. He didn\u2019t want to die with unfinished business.\u00a0It was inspirational and I decided to do the same thing right then instead of\u00a0waiting until I was dying. To this day, I make sure that when a call or a visit\u00a0is over, there are no loose ends. I\u2019ve said what I wanted to say, I\u2019ve listened\u00a0to what someone else wants to say and there would be no regrets if this was the\u00a0last time I saw that person. You just never know if we\u2019re having our last day
or if we have decades ahead of us.<\/p>\n
It takes courage and commitment to\u00a0stop fighting. When you turn to mediation, that doesn\u2019t mean that one person\u00a0gets what they want while the other one gets nothing. When you walk away from
mediation, everyone gave up something and got something. That\u2019s what meeting in\u00a0the middle means. If you can develop the great skill of looking at a situation\u00a0from someone else\u2019s point of view, if you can meet them where they are, you can\u00a0find a way to resolve a situation without fighting and becoming defensive.\u00a0There is a famous Native American proverb:<\/p>\n
\u201cNever criticize a man until you\u2019ve walked a mile in his moccasins.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sometimes fighting can be nothing\u00a0more than a bad habit, a familiar way to communicate. But it doesn\u2019t bring\u00a0peace, even if you win. When you fight with someone and no one backs down,\u00a0there are no winners. When you let go and search for solutions, everybody wins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My sister came to visit me last\u00a0weekend. It was the first time in a long time, she lives in Northern\u00a0California, and I was thrilled to have her here. We ate great food, we shopped,\u00a0we watched the San Francisco 49ers, my sister\u2019s favorite football team (they\u00a0won!), we laughed and talked about everything. It wasn\u2019t always this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2733,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions\/2733"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}