The three ways we can make a difference in the world are to abide, fight or unite. To abide requires the courage to live. To fight requires the courage to overcome our fear of “the other”. To unite requires the courage to overcome our fear of ourselves.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
Marianne Williamson
To Abide
Even abiding with the status quo requires a lot of courage. Being alive can already be frightening enough without facing all the challenges that are calling us. The more we grow, the more is expected of us and the more we expect of ourselves and of life. Life has its ways to always keep us on the edge, no matter how much we have grown as persons and progressed in physical ease and comfort. Just because everybody alive is living, doesn’t mean it’s easy. It just means we are all in the same boat together.
It’s easy to underestimate the courage involved in just being a living, breathing human being, thinking that we don’t have much choice because we’re instinctively afraid of dying. However, one fear does not compensate another. All our fears just add up together. Furthermore, the mind has a safety-mechanism to protect you whenever you aren’t able to face reality, by simply detaching you from it. So unless you’re unconscious or in a psychosis (which is quite unlikely since then you wouldn’t be reading this), you can already consider yourself pretty darn courageous to remain connected with reality the way that you do.
Rather than just looking outwards and getting upset about others complaining about every-day-life challenges that you think they shouldn’t be complaining about, cut yourself some slack and give yourself some more compassion and appreciation for all the challenges involved in ‘just staying alive’ that you also face every day. To overlook this achievement is to belittle yourself. And belittling yourself makes it seem fair to belittle others just the same.
Life is change and, eventually, people may find out how to enjoy life more by meeting their own needs in ways that benefit others as well. Therefore, patiently waiting for others to change for the better is not an entirely mad idea. Just doing your thing, getting out of the way of others as much as possible, can actually improve the world, but probably not as fast as you would like.
To Fight
Fighting (either strategically, verbally or physically) requires us to overcome our fear of what will happen when we try to make life even more challenging than it already is, for those who stand in the way of our favourite strategies to have our own needs met. Fighting is our path of least resistance when the most promising opportunity for progress that we can see is to obstruct the choices and strategies of others.
For instance, someone might join the queue you are standing in at a position in front of you, probably making your wait a few minutes longer, and preventing you from using those minutes for something you’d prefer over waiting in that queue. So you might try to stimulate their sense of shame by letting them know why you think that their action makes them universally despicable as a person. This might work. The person might respond: “Oh, I don’t want to be a despicable person, please let me move quickly to the end of the queue”. But the person may also pretend (s)he didn’t hear you, causing a very awkward, tense situation for both of you. And if you keep persisting that the other person abides to your request for them to feel ashamed and move to the back of the queue, it might even escalate into a full-blown fist fight, or even worse. That’s the risk you courageously take by sticking your neck out to deal with injustice by fighting with people.
Any discomfort you can add to another person’s choice might discourage her or him from doing the same thing again in the future. Depending on which behaviour you have discouraged, this may be seen as an improvement of the world. However, how much will it contribute to a sense of oneness and genuine care for each other to teach people to be motivated by the prevention of discomfort, pain or harm to themselves?
I’m interested in learning that’s motivated by reverence for life, that’s motivated by a desire to learn skills, to learn new things that help us to better contribute to our own well-being and the well-being of others. And what fills me with great sadness is any learning that I see motivated by coercion.Marshall Rosenberg
Of course, if abiding to unacceptable behaviour is your only alternative, ‘correcting’ people by fighting their choices can indeed move the world forwards. If only in the short term. Fighting doesn’t necessarily require more courage than abiding, but it definitely doesn’t involve less courage either. It’s simply the only choice to make when we cannot allow ourselves to not intervene, while lacking the trust that everyone’s interests can be reconciled.
To Unite
The courage required to seek for unity with whomever your challenge involves does not depend on outside circumstances, but only on the mental-emotional circumstances inside of yourself. Efforts to restore unity are not opposed to fighting, nor are they opposed to abiding. By definition, unity is the reconciliation of opposites. A mental-emotional state of oneness involves respect for conflict as the expression and manifestation of the inner oppositions within the mental-emotional space of individual human beings who are trying to live as happily and beautifully as possible, with each other and within Nature.
For someone who has never heard about Nonviolent Communication, Dominic Barter’s Restorative Circles or Nonviolent Peaceforce, it can be hard to believe that reality can be even better than the ‘happy’ endings of fantasy stories, where only the main characters get to live happily ever after, while their adversaries do not. In real life, however, any conflict can be dealt with in a way that everyone’s perspective gets understood and respected, relationships are restored and the people involved start to willingly contribute to each other. This is thanks to the fact that all of our basic human needs can be met in many ways, including our instinctive desire to see others happy and make a meaningful contribution to them. But only if we can do so freely, on our own initiative, and if we can recognise our own humanness in each other.
To move towards unity merely involves providing people with the emotional space they need to connect with the humanness behind their own feelings in the moment, and share the beautiful needs that underlie their currently preferred or habituated strategies. If everyone gets to be actively, respectfully and creatively involved in supporting each other’s challenges at the level of our shared human needs, completely new strategies naturally emerge that are not only owned and supported by everyone together, but also take everyone’s needs into account at the same time.
We don’t need to stop fighting, or wait for others to stop fighting, in order to start moving towards unity. The only right moment for the experience of oneness is now. And the only step we can take towards oneness, at any moment, is to acknowledge where we currently are (no matter whether we’re fighting or abiding), by observing the state of our mind and our feelings. To do this, simply ask yourself this question without judging your answer:
“Am I perceiving wrongness, guilt or evil (either within myself or in others), or am I experiencing love and seeing the beauty of my passion for how I wish life to be enriched?”
As I explain in the book “The Guilt Delusion: A Recipe for Love that Dissolves Hatred, Greed and Cruelty”, guilt and love are our two mutually exclusive sources of security. When we are in a mental-emotional state of separateness, our only choice to protect ourselves and others is through feeling or projecting guilt. We can only secure ourselves from a place of non-exclusive love when we are in a mental-emotional state of oneness, in which guilt makes no sense.
Therefore, noticing whether you are perceiving guilt or experiencing love simply allows you to be aware of whether it is oneness or separateness that you are currently living in and acting from. When you are in a mental-emotional state of separateness, there is nothing you can do to change it other than through accepting your own feelings and needs in the moment. Blaming yourself for being where you are just keeps you there and reinforces your sense of guilt and separateness.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do thatMartin Luther King Jr.
If you wish to support yourself to move towards oneness, all you can do is have compassion for yourself and empathise with your own feelings and needs. If you wish to support others to move towards oneness, all you can do is to have compassion for them and support them to empathise with themselves by the example of your empathy for them.
However, always seek for compassion with yourself first, because without being in a mental-emotional state of oneness yourself, it’s impossible to provide others the congruence, empathy and non-exclusive love that they need to move towards oneness too. And without acknowledging and respecting all aspects of who you are, you will not be able to respect all those aspects in others either.
This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I give myself the compassion I need.Kristin Neff,
Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind