Hamilton's Barn

Over and over again I am visited by the ghost of conflict past. He always seems to show me a way I could have handled a thing better and shows me a sunnier outcome. My brain seems to be wired in such a way that I seek conflict, mis-handle it and finally regret it.

It would seem a little crazy.

What would be crazier would be to dedicate zero time to understanding communication, to stop listening and assume that the things I have to say will still bear meaning, or to use my sad skill set in the precise way that has failed me up until now as if nothing is at all falling apart.

So I read. 

And then I try to summarize some of the take-aways out of the whole thing.

"Your first negotiation is really with yourself, to move from being focused on what I’m right about to starting to be a little bit curious about why we see this so differently."

Wow. I mean, that's such  giant little shift in thinking. I need to be in a place where the outcome means more than my ego.

When my dad died I hadn't talked to him for almost 8 years. I owed him money that I didn't feel like I owed him. I disagreed with none of his words and almost all of his actions. Our relationship had ended and what tendrils still connected us were painful and poisonous.

People have asked me how I overcame that. I really didn't. A lot of me is still angry about things he did. A lot of me is stil pretty sure I was right about many things in that relationship, but he got pancreatic Cancer and we ran out of resolution time. It became clear that we were not going to work things out and neither of us would ever find out who was the good guy in our story. Now, I don't think there was one and finding out more and more that there rarely is has changed everything I believe about narrative, It's changed the movies I like and the books I love.

Not the point. What is the point is that it was no longer useful to decide who was right, I ceased to worry if I was right and I just focused on if I was kind. I could control that.

Now, I fail this same test in daily interactions almost every time. I still want to be right. I don't know a whole lot of things more powerful in my life than my desire to be right.

It serves me poorly. It always damages things. I need to see and end date - because sometimes there is one, some times we're killing the relationship - and work on conversation like I did with my father.

I really don't want forgiving my dad to be the best thing I ever did. 

"If a conversation feels difficult, there’s often something about identity, something that situation suggests about you, that raises the stakes on the whole conversation. That’s part of the anxiety that then drives the intensity of the feelings. Those feelings color our story about what happened, and what should happen in the future."

I think this relates to the above. Perhaps the lesson to walk away with here is that our sleves are usually bigger enemies to our lives than the others.

And yet we always seem to concieve of solutions to our selves as social animals by improving the individual. We always tell each other to take time for ourselves, to work on ourselves. Maybe better advice would be to "try to set yourself aside for a minute."

Americans hate any challenges to the truism that "You need to love yourself before you love anyone else."

I think we need to love ourselves through our love of others. I think we need to see ourselves as social, interdependent entities.

But I'm usually wrong.