Choosing to be peaceful is a good choice. . .

IN EVERY CONFLICT, ASK, “WOULD I RATHER BE PEACEFUL OR RIGHT?”I was raised by a father who always insisted he was right.  Perhaps you were too.  It became my nature, even as a youngster, to fight him at every opportunity.  I felt like it was my job to defend the family against his certainty that there was one way to see every thing, and it was his way.  He and I battled for years while my mother, approvingly, looked on.  Over politics, religion, even music and the mundane too, like which television shows worth watching.  We were on opposite sides of every issue that was raised.  Even after I married and moved away, the disagreements continued.  They had become habitual.

I am grateful that I gradually learned how to give up the fight to be right.  For so many reasons I am grateful.  For one, my father and I were able to have a few peaceful years before he died.  Because I had been introduced to the idea that anger of any kind is rooted in fear, this allowed me to see him in a whole new way.  His anger wasn’t really at me, ever, it was at any one who thought differently.  His insecurities simply demanded  that others agree.

I was overwhelmed by the power of his fear when I interviewed him for a family of origin class I was taking early in my recovery.  He said at that time that he had gone to work afraid, every day of his life; afraid he would make a mistake that would cost the bank money and destroy his good reputation.  I was stunned by his comment.  I couldn’t imagine how it must have felt to show up for work every day, afraid.  And even though this conversation occurred some years after his retirement from the bank, he was still that same man, still afraid and still quite certain that his way of seeing the world was the right way.

I felt truly sad for him for the first time in my life, at that moment.  I could see him as he really was, not the ogre I had made him out to be.  Fear is so debilitating.  It doesn’t allow for clarity of thinking.  It generally doesn’t allow for openness to new ideas.  Living in a restricted frame of mind is safest when fear is your constant companion.  I am amazed at the many successes my dad actually had considering how fearful he was. He had obviously pushed himself to excel in spite of his daily struggles with fear.

The choice to be peaceful rather than right doesn’t actually mean that one’s opinion is unimportant.  In fact, one’s particular opinion may make more sense in the larger scheme of things.  Rather it means that letting go of the battle is far more sensible, that expecting to change another person’s mind is generally sheer folly.  I would have to credit Al-Anon with strengthening this resolve in me.  The power of detachment, the willingness to choose to be peaceful rather than making every conversation a battleground, is freedom at its very best. There is no mystery in how this is done.  It’s a decision that any one of us can make as many times a day as the opportunity to disagree comes up.