Lately, I have been thinking that conversations work like doors. Sometimes conversations are “open” and through them we can see new possibilities. Other times you can feel a discussion closing down, locking out new information or diverse viewpoints.
Powerful questions have a great habit of re-opening constricted conversations. This week I ran across a short video from Thailand that asks two intriguing questions:
What you are responsible for?
What is your commitment?
Asking myself these questions has a centering effect when in stressful situations. They open my internal doorways. The two questions help me clarify what I can control and my appropriate next steps; I pause (a good thing in conflict) as I consider, “OK, what really am I responsible for in this situation?” and “What are my highest commitments?” And, as seen in the video, asking others can transform someone you believe you know well into a fascinating stranger.
I invite you to give them a try and welcome your insights!
I am always looking for leaders who resourcefully overcome huge challenges and create societal transformation in their wake. Some of our more famous 20th century conflict transformation stars would be Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma and of course, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet, there are many lesser-known courageous souls around the world who are continuing to play well and changing our landscape.
Curbelo demonstrates the mastery of four critical cross-cultural conflict resolution strategies:
Gather information – At the beginning of any battle we are best served by paying attention and taking stock of the battlefield upon which we stand. For example, to tackle the problem of Indian independence, Gandhi spent over a year traveling on third-class trains and on foot, asking everyone he could — Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Brahmins, Untouchables and so on — about India and its needs. Similarly, Curbelo spent two years simply walking the crime-ridden streets of Guayaquil, asking and listening to gang members, families and other community members.
Be Flexible – Focus on a goal, but keep the final product open to revision. Notice how Curbelo’s goal of mitigating poverty and suffering allows certain protections of the youth she serves to remain in place. She isn’t there to stamp out gangs or rid the streets of guns, just to effectively help.
Engage our creativity — The best solutions are both surprising and elegant.As I wrote in a previous post on employing art, creative ways to express our truth packs extra power. By honoring that gangs are a source of community and identity, Curbelo was able to foster the forming of a united nations of past warring groups, complete with an inaugural celebration!
Act Courageously – It’s one thing to know what is right, but another to do it. A conflict transformation star holds that everyone deserves a chance and basic support. I remember Maria Montessori, who in the early 20th century spent years working with Italian children who had been written off as handicapped or damaged. Montessori’s work went on to transform early childhood education worldwide. Curbelo’s community is now filled with those who now many in society fear or deplore. May her work will have the same wings that Montessori’s enjoyed.
I hope you find the article of interest and inspiring!
Wander where there is no path. Be all that heaven gave you, but act as though you have received nothing. Be empty, that is all. — Chuang Tzu
A dear friend recently shared a series of losses that he had suffered. As he explained how a terminally ill friend had become the “final straw” in breaking his foundational beliefs about death and his own mortality, I found myself strangely excited. In case you might find me a bit twisted, I hope you’ll understand that my enthusiasm rose from a deep belief in the power of confusion.
I wouldn’t wish such tragedy on anyone, yet we don’t seem to become wiser when all is easy and understood. Really, why should we? If I have the world figured out, I don’t have much incentive to dig deeper. It’s as though crisis creates cracks that allows wisdom’s light to seep in. I trust that as my friend earnestly wrestles with how to deal with great loss and the inevitability of death, he is going to gather insight. Selfishly, I hope he’ll share his garnered prizes with us.
It feels like our core beliefs create a sort of scaffolding or something solid to stand on over the sea of uncertainty. “I am a mother,” “I am from Minnesota,” or “I live in a democracy,” might be some of the planks that support my identity or the lookout post I have built. But, with enough time, the wood gets worn. Tough times also have a habit of ripping up carefully lain floorboards, like the globally favorite, “The financial markets are secure.”
When my core beliefs are battered and I can’t tie reality up with a nice bow, I can feel set adrift in that sea. Questions like, “Who am I? What do I believe? What should I do next?” become hard to answer. Life, or my interpretation of it, gets messy or confusing.
I’ve come to have an innate trust in this messiness. My perspective expands when life pushes me to move into a state of not knowing. The more I become comfortable hanging out in the confusion, the more clarity I bring back. Meanwhile, we all have a fundamental desire to get back to solid ground again; I like to know who I am, or pretend to anyway, and to believe that I know how this all works!
Hanging out in messiness as mediator has helped. Usually you will have two sides at the negotiation table that have completely different versions of what occurred in a dispute. A first impulse is to want to determine who is right and who is crazy. Yet, the mediator’s job isn’t to find the real truth, but instead to hold a confusing reality that is created by assuming that the opposing stories are equal. Allowing there to be irreconcilable differences opens the possibility of a third interpretation of the situation that the parties can create together.
Without firm footing on how the world works, or who I am, I notice that I slow down and better consider each step forward. It creates a rawness or necessary vulnerability, as I wonder what else I have been missing. It wakes up my compassion as I realize that we are all madly trying to piece together how to play well with very limited information. Also, if we take a cue from all the major religions, learning to love the mess is “right work” and one of our main life tasks. So, I get hopeful when those I love dip into confusion, and look forward to the treasures my dear friend might uncover in that chaotic space.
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. – Pablo Picasso
I have an abiding fascination with how art can transform perceptions of our challenges. Although we may perceive the arts (painting, poetry, dance) as a cultured practice of creating beauty, historically artists have also acted as highly effective conflict transformers. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is a case in point. To protest a massive bombing of over a thousand Basque Guernican citizens on market day during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso began the large mural fourteen days after the attack. The work’s subsequent tour through Europe in 1937 brought widespread attention to the brutality of the conflict and its collaborators.
Guernica, Pablo Picasso
DIA blue horse sculpture
This week I enjoyed reading about how art was used to creatively protest…well, art! To comment on the new Luis Jimenez blue horse sculpture installed at the Denver International Airport, real estate developer Rachel Hultin solicited “protest haikus” (a 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable form of Japanese poetry) to provide to the Denver Mayor’s office. The 32-foot fiberglass piece with glowing red eyes and fully “equipped” had folks’ creative juices flowing. Over 200 poets added their two cents in classic form:
Because of this thing/People think they are in hell/Instead of Denver
Ugly devil horse/horrifies the traveler/shames our fair city
Eyes redder than mine/ Little horse on the prairie / Welcome to Denver!
The latest artistic effort to capture my attention is described in the attached YouTube video. Paul “Moose” Curtis uses inner city grime as his canvas. Through his work, he creates beauty while raising awareness about urban environmental conditions. May you enjoy and employ your creativity!
I’m not sure who came up with the favorite saying, but among three dear friends we took it to heart. I think Julie invented it, but she likes to credit Annie or me since her children are the youngest of the lot.
In the early 1990’s I was mothering two boys under three and trying to work full time. My husband Bruce was in law school, so finances and time together were limited. I would work during the day and he would attend classes in the evenings. Crossing paths at the front door, we’d often hand a hungry, dirty-diapered baby to the one now on duty. We were thankfully young enough to power through these crazy times since on every level we were just barely “pulling it off.” I’m still amazed that Bruce graduated and I was able to start a career.
My friends Annie and Julie were in the same boat. With seven kids and three jobs between us, we’d meet monthly at our self-fashioned book club. Somehow we adopted the mantra, “You need people.” We used this tag line to justify getting a cleaning service to muck out our homes. It made it sort of all right that we needed childcare to sneak away a few times a year to get a manicure. What I didn’t realize at the time, “I need a team” was the underlying truth of why I not only I should buy support services, but it was why I deeply needed these friends to survive early parenthood.
Recognizing we needed help was hard to admit since we also believed that as American women we were supposed to pull off mothering and working on our own. Not long out of college in the 1980′s we each considered being successful grownups meant figuring out how to be as independent as possible.
Living in Washington DC we were all far from family. So, to Julie and Annie I went if we needed help.Julie and her husband appeared at 4 a.m. to watch over our eldest when the second was born. When we wanted to build a deck, Annie’s husband was found wildly digging behind our house for hours in a rainstorm. It clearly took a team to keep Bruce and I afloat even if I couldn’t fully admit it.
Now almost twenty years later with my children about grown, our motherhood mantra keeps circling through my head. As I research global approaches to overcoming difficult times, “It takes a team,” is the resounding wisdom. When the going gets rough, community is supposed to be at our sides.
For example, cross-culturally during times of major loss we would not be expected to grieve alone. People are expected to stop by and check on the mourners. African ritualist Malidoma Somé adds, “Dagara people don’t comprehend the idea of private grief.” From the Jewish tradition we learn the practice of sitting shiva where friends provide constant company and support to the mourners for seven days. In the Iroquois culture, this same practice continues for eleven days.
Even as a person dies, in many, many cultures, he or she is kept company through the last breath and is not left alone until days after. In Japan, loved ones will bathe and sleep near the corpse, speaking to their departed loved one until internment. We are to be sung to, guided and comforted through this greatest transition.
This wisdom transcends into our everyday. In the years after writing When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner has asked thousands what got them through a life crisis. The answer to his question was a single word, “community.”
We weren’t dealing with physical death thankfully as newly minted mothers. Yet, our old footloose and free lives were ending as we were initiated into motherhood. We needed a team, and thank goodness we adopted this truth — no matter who invented it.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. – Shunryu Suzuki
By nature, I am happiest when I am running, hiking or dancing around my kitchen. My children were dragged onto trails and ski hills from a very early age, I must admit, not so much so they would learn, but so I could get back to what I dearly missed. I’m also in love with learning and then sharing what I have picked up along the way. And I adore my family and friends and my favorite cup of tea and the quiet around our house and…there’s a lot to which I am very attached.
Threaten the above list and I get jumpy. Really threaten to remove my favorites, and I find myself in thrown into tough times. At the most dramatic level of loss, “If I don’t have what I love, what makes life worth living?” can become a scary question looming within us.
From a brain perspective, our limbic system, located in the center of our heads, controls our attachments. As authors Lewis, Amini and Lannon describe in A General Theory of Love, when we bond with someone or something, the limbic system emits a pleasing blend of chemicals. We like those chemicals and want to keep them coming. Think of the Labrador retriever outside the grocery store howling for her milk-buying human. If she could translate her brain signals into English, she might be heard to say “I miss my oxytocin, give me baaaaaack my oxytocin!
I like oxytocin, which courses through my cerebral region when I hug my children or cuddle up next to my husband. As I have also admitted above, I’m also a big fan of the endorphins that I emit when exercising.The more I learn more about my brain, I must make peace with what might appear as a fairly healthy lifestyle, is actually another “better living through chemicals” advertisement.
So, when I asked my aunt-in-law, who at 81 remains vibrant and fully engaged in life how she does it, her answer resonated deeply. Seven years ago she lost her husband. At an early age her father and mother passed away. Her brother died of a heart attack in his early forties and there have been other major disappointments along her path. Yet, I can talk with her about anything. She travels all over the world and is always up for a wild new experience. Despite all the loss, she also really, really loves me.
Her answer to my question was simple. “I don’t know really why I am in such good shape,” she told me, “but I have noticed that I have had to learn to love in different ways.”
In these words, I first find the cross-cultural tenet of approaching every situation with an open attitude. The martial artists name meeting every challenge with an “I don’t know” as shoshin or fostering a Beginner’s Mind. Around the world it is posited that only in not knowing can we ever learn.
I was reminded of this snippet of wisdom as I taught the “Thriving Through Tough Times” course in January. One of the grandmothers clearly emitted my aunt’s joy-filled demeanor and was deeply admired professionally and personally by her long-term friends in the group. As we talked about surviving tough times, her friends urged her, “Tell Deidre The One Assumption,” “Yes, tell her, tell her.” She smiled and threw up her hands with a bit of a giggle and responded, “OK, the one assumption I always try to make is…that I don’t know anything.” As I made her acquaintance over the weekend, it was clear that she knew a whole lot more than I did, and in that lay the poetry.
My aunt in her response didn’t tell me not to love. She wasn’t saying to love less so it would hurt less when inevitable change occurs. Her subtle advice urged me to continue to love deeply, let those feelings and chemicals flow, but also to keep learning how to adjust to change. Keep learning how to love to dance, even if you find yourself with one leg, as Reynaldo Ojeda models in the attached video clip.
Find different ways to adore your loved ones even after they have departed your home or left this earth. Keep practicing new forms of love as those that we love change form. I think that is one of the lessons, but I shouldn’t really “know” now, should I?
, Rabbi Harold Kushner has asked thousands what got them through a life crisis. The answer to his question was a single word, “community.” 
, when we bond with someone or something, the limbic system emits a pleasing blend of chemicals. We like those chemicals and want to keep them coming. Think of the Labrador retriever outside the grocery store howling for her milk-buying human. If she could translate her brain signals into English, she might be heard to say “I miss my oxytocin, give me baaaaaack my oxytocin!
. Around the world it is posited that only in not knowing can we ever learn.