Love Will Keep It Together
Love holds things together. That idea puzzles a lot of people, yet it tends to work anyway. Most of us grew up hearing the advice to turn the other cheek. Why it actually produces results can be slippery to pin down. Maybe it works because it keeps you in a steadier frame of mind, and steadier people tend to get treated better in return.
I want to name a particular habit for this discussion: ambiguous hostility. It's the reflex to grab something that carried no bad intent and reshape it into an insult. The chip on the shoulder, essentially. Give a person with this problem any opening to read an action the wrong way, and they will take it every time.
We have far more say over our own feelings than we tend to admit. "I couldn't help it," someone insists, "he made me angry." Ask yourself a couple of things. Does that person's opinion carry any real weight with you? And was the remark even designed to manipulate you? If you hand over your reaction to them, you've handed over control of yourself. Why would you want that?
Build a practice of relaxation or meditation. Rather than merely thinking about peace or love, try to actually become peaceful or loving. There's research backing this up. In one community, crime rates dropped when a large group did more than pray for peace; they pictured it and settled into a calm state themselves.
A small example from this week. I arrived early for a doctor's appointment and had the waiting room to myself. The staff remarked on how calm the room felt, and they were right, it was a good kind of quiet. Compare that to another visit, when a child was shrieking and acting out while his parents either wouldn't or couldn't settle him. I came close to leaving, and I'm normally patient with kids. The whole mood of that room was a different animal.
It's also easy to make a rough situation rougher. I've landed in plenty of checkout lines where the customer ahead of me hits some snag and the rest of us have to stand there until a manager sorts it out. When I have nowhere I need to be, no appointment, nobody waiting on me, patience costs me nothing, and a little humor can take the edge off for everyone.
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. Let me walk beside my brother in harmony. Let it start right here, in this room, this line, this moment. Too often we keep waiting for peace to break out somewhere far away, somewhere like the Middle East, as if it can't begin where we're standing.