How easy it is to spend your life finding faults! If your disposition is such that you definitely need full moon on all the days of the month, the summer and winter temperatures have to be predetermined and the needle on the barometer should be steady, imagine the kind of agony you would be living in, day in and day out! Yet inspite of knowing that control over these natural phenomena is out of bounds, if we have the fault finding gene predominantly floating around in our system, our life’s purpose is then programmed! We live our lives blaming everything and everyone we can lay our hands on, and if there were any jobs available for this post, most of us would be employed or be in the queue for the position!
We know there would be no conflict resolution as soon as one person counters the other with a fault that the other person has, instead of focusing on the current issue. This is what happens in most relationships, especially marital ones. The blame game goes on and on, and it leaves me wondering: Do you want to fight, or do you want to solve the problem? Finding a loophole in the other person’s behavior does not justify your stand: how do you assert your viewpoint at the expense of the other? How does it help in any resolution or arriving at an amicable solution? I know sometimes there are no resolutions to certain conflicts. If the husband is a stickler for perfectionism for example, he will hit the roof every time he sees a speck of dust on the centre table, or finds hair in the wash room. If the wife is the kind who lives her life by the clock, imagine how she would cope with the agony of a travelling husband or even one who is in the marketing and sales field! The partners would be labeled as shoddy and unclean, and unpunctual without any respect for time, respectively. These would become the battleground for conflicts where the underlying issues would also escalate and reach alarming proportions. I guess it would take a lot of looking from behind the mirror, to actually get into a frame of mind when we can think from the others’ perspective.
If only we are able to assimilate one simple fact: Not everybody lives by our rules: Each one of us is made different, and how many ever arguments we go through, if we insist on holding on to our view of an issue, the conflict is never resolved. Of course there are some conflicts that can never be resolved; conflicts that exist on issues dealing with family interpersonal clashes, conflicts even within ourselves where we keep wondering whether a certain step we have taken was in everybody’s best interests or not, conflicts that we sometime let go for we reach a catch 22 situation, and we know we cannot go further. In such cases, what do we do? Stewing in the cauldron never did anyone good. All we can do is to arrive at an impasse, let go of the emotional pain and get on with life. I know, it is easier said than done, and I am certainly not claiming to be a monk with profound insight or the temperance to follow this. But I can truthfully say that though the emotional memories surface, rationalizing happens faster with me nowadays than it did before, and I am able to set aside these issues and continue as my life unfolds. Now that is definitely good enough for me!
Mohana Narayanan
February 17, 2011
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