Communicating Authentically

I seldom have the type of dramatic, cathartic, life-changing epiphanies that Hollywood has branded as true insight. I’m talking about the kind of experience where a beam of light breaks through the clouds and bathes me in golden sunshine while a choir sings and doves fly blissfully overhead.

No, my insights are more like a steady drip of brown water from the roof of a dank cave, gradually building into oddly shaped piles of sediment that stand in the way of my thinking until I trip over them and sit up, rubbing my ankle and wailing, “How long has that been there?”

Lately, I’ve been tripping over mental stalagmites around dialogue and connection. Maybe it’s all one stack. I don’t know. It’s dark in there. But the thoughts that keep occurring to me are:

1. Everything is interconnected in some way and finding the connection helps you make things work better.
2. Sometimes, just getting people together to talk is the most productive thing you can do, because it helps people realize the connection.

This realization seems to apply to everything: politics, religion, business, relationships, health, science, spelunking — you name it. Get people talking, recognizing their connections, and suddenly the issue at hand is taken to a healthier, higher level and progress occurs.

I also notice there are people who refuse to engage with those who disagree with them. It seems silly to me, because engaging others seems like the only way to achieve a mutually satisfactory outcome. I know what it’s like to have my needs ignored, and that certainly never leads to a satisfactory outcome for me. I know from my own experience that digging in my heels and swinging my fists seldom gets me what I want, either. It’s not that I never do that, but at some point even I realize, “Hey, this isn’t working,” and I try a different tactic. And as I’ve already established, I’m rather thick-skulled. So, I wonder why there are hoards of people out there who still haven’t caught on to that little tip.

Here’s the best explanation I’ve come up with:

Many people out there have achieved success by using force, possibly because they were members of a privileged majority or because they had the best weapons. However, the game is changing. In many states, white people are no longer the majority. Mainstream moderates are campaigning for gay rights. Technology has made many of our assumptions obsolete: warfare, communication, artistic expression, etc. Personally, I don’t have any problem with any of the above. But for those who feel differently, it must be frustrating. It’s hard when the power base shifts away from you. It’s hard when your entire moral code is questioned by those around you. It’s hard to fight an intelligence war when you’ve only ever been trained to respond with mechanical force. Many people’s lives have become trying to jam a square peg into a round hole.

Or to switch metaphors, it’s like being a polar bear on a melting ice floe: the world as you know it is rapidly disintegrating. You cling to your icy refuge and claw the hell out of anything that comes near you.

Often, fear keeps us from seeing new possibilities arising. Many have been convinced by extremist media pundits that anyone with a different viewpoint is the enemy. So when the Greenpeace ship appears on the horizon to rescue them from the frigid Arctic waters, many see environmental terrorists. People building an Islamic community center and mosque in New York are radical Muslim terrorists. Pastors seeking to open a dialogue about social justice are communists. And probably terrorists as well. And they’re all attacking our way of life. The others created the situation. We certainly are not accountable for the circumstance we find ourselves in, the others are. Giving the others credence will just guarantee destruction.

But there are no others. We’re all in this together. The notion of “the other” is an illusion. When we react to our changing world with anger, dissension, conflict, willful ignorance or stubbornness, the behavior is self-defeating. Like it or not, we are all connected. When we lash out at each other in hurtful ways, we always, always, always wind up hurting ourselves.

My belief is that the way out is through dialogue and connection (there’s that stalagmite again): engaging in civil and respectful dialogue, wherever and whenever possible, with those who have a different viewpoint, in the hope of finding how we are connected. And then nurturing that connection until a better way presents itself.

Speaking personally, whenever I have shut down, or been shut out of, a dialogue (or reacted with anger or swinging fists), the outcome has always been regrettable. And I have never engaged in a heart-to-heart dialogue with another human being that did not have a positive outcome. It may not have been what I initially wanted, and it may have taken longer than I hoped, but somehow it always ended up just fine.

Does this qualify as insight? Not sure. But I think the theory has merit.