Metamorphosis

In replying to my e-mail about my previous week, my mother observed that my account was peppered with reports of singing and dancing. She noted that this was something that had emerged in the last several months. She didn't remember my being interested in music or dance in the past.

She said this shift reminded her of her own mother, who had almost developed another personality around the age that I am now. In my maternal grandmother's case, the great awakening involved art. She discovered a talent and passion for painting. She became something of a Grandma Moses, which was neat to witness.

My grandmother was a really cool person. To be compared with her -- in any way, shape or form -- feels like a compliment.

How could I?

During a meeting that I attended a couple of days ago, I had a temper tantrum. I shouted and swore at the facilitator.

As soon as I'd done it, I felt ashamed of my behaviour and apologized.

Luckily it didn't phase the facilitator. As a matter of fact, she gave me a ride home after the meeting, and was perfectly friendly.

But that isn't the point. What's more relevant is that I am deeply committed to compassionate communication, and I violated my own principles.

Only a week previously, I'd participated in a two-day conflict resolution workshop. I did a consensus decision making workshop in September, and I'm registered for another one in April. One of my favourite books is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

Yet, when it felt to me as if one of my core buttons was being pushed, the blood rushed to my head, and I lashed out.

When I later recalled what I'd said, I was grateful for a couple of things. First of all, I had used I statements. Secondly, I had criticized the facilitator's behaviour (or at least my perception of her behaviour). I had not called her names or questioned her integrity as a person.

Of course that doesn't excuse my behaviour. I consider it to have been totally unacceptable.

I have been going over the incident in an effort to recognize the dynamics, learn from it, and be better prepared when a similar situation arises in future.

I have tried to avoid beating up on myself, as that would only compound the problem. I've tried to accept that I'm imperfect and to forgive myself.

In our Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community meetings, which was where this happened, we have a beautiful tool that is designed to address this very scenario. Each meeting participant has three cards.

When a meeting participant holds up a green card, it means, "I agree," or, "I have information to contribute." A yellow card means, "I have a question," or, "I have a concern." A red card means, "I disagree," or, "There is something terribly wrong going on here."

When a participant holds up a red card, the facilitator is obliged to stop the main discussion so that the issue can be addressed. If I had remembered to use it, that one thing -- a little red card -- would have created a very different outcome.

I also forgot to maintain an attitude of curiosity. Instead, I jumped to conclusions about the facilitator's intentions.

In the interim, I have thought of a way of tweaking the meeting process so that it will accomplish what the facilitator wants while at the same time addressing my needs. I will suggest it to her before our next meeting.

Interestingly enough, I once again have found myself playing leap frog with another blogger. Yesterday there was an entry entitled Control on the Sensible Living blog. As soon as I saw it, I thought, "Oh, Annie, you've read my mind."

I never promised you a rose garden

Way to go, Michelle Obama!

Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.

This weekend I watched a couple of thought-provoking films about rivers and water at the Global Film Festival here in Nanaimo. There was some gut wrenching footage, including some of a hydro electric scheme in my own beloved province of British Columbia. Perhaps the scene that haunts me the most, though, is a field of gorgeous yellow roses being irrigated in Kenya while children drink from a filthy cesspool nearby.

I remembered the times I'd ordered flowers for friends. Why? In some cases it was because they had lost a loved one. I wanted them to know that I was sad for them and that I cared about them. All the same, it often was difficult for me to discuss death.

• It was awkward if I knew that a friend had mixed feelings towards a parent who had just died, for example. I knew, from my own father's death, that you could feel angry about some of the things that your parent had done, but still feel as if you'd been punched in the solar plexus when they died.


• Perhaps the bereaved person was someone whom I knew through work or business, someone to whom I felt obliged to be polite, but to whom I did not feel close. (This scenario admittedly is one that I do not expect to encounter now that I have embraced what I would call a more authentic lifestyle.)


• Perhaps I felt guilty for having emigrated and for living far away from the bereaved person.


• Perhaps I'd experienced the bereaved person as competitive, and wanted to prove that I could send them just as big a vase of flowers as the one they'd sent me (or, better still, an even bigger one).

Well, for any number of reasons, it suited me to order a safe vase of flowers, accompanied by a one-size-fits-all note, "Thinking of you at this difficult time." But, in taking that easy way out, I was killing people in a Third World country.

You may think I'm being melodramatic. You may think it's ridiculous to characterize myself as an axe murderer just because I did something as innocent as buying flowers. But stop and think about it for a moment. Those flowers were using up water and soil that local people otherwise could have used to grow food. In order for the flowers to be unblemished, they would have been sprayed with pesticides. If the Third World farm labourers were typical, they worked in poor conditions, for low wages. The transportation of the flowers from a warm country to Canada used non-renewable fossil fuels and pumped greenhouse gases into the air.

The next friend who loses a loved one is not going to get flowers from me. If they live close to me, I'm going to deliver a homemade casserole to them. If they live far away, I'm going to sit down and write a letter, even if it takes me forever to figure out what to say.

Well, at least one good thing came out of this weekend. I had been struggling to shake my caffeine addiction. But I walked out of those films feeling the same way about coffee as I felt about flowers from distant countries. I never want to touch the stuff with a ten foot barge pole.

Duet in A Major

Yesterday I was inspired by Annie's blog post on Patience. I especially loved the John Ciardi quotation, which was new to me, "Patience is the art of caring slowly."

I reflected on a couple of my endeavours about which I currently was feeling impatient. Annie's blog entry reminded me that, like babies, my projects needed time for gestation. When they came to fruition I would be rewarded very amply for any patience I had invested in them.

But, compelling though Annie's message was, it felt slightly out of focus. It seemed almost -- but not quite -- right. I wondered, "What's wrong with this picture?"

What was bothering me was the recollection that, in many instances, I had been patient. Actually, I had been too patient, for too long. I had endured situations that had felt unacceptable to me. I wondered how to reconcile the need for patience and the need for assertiveness.

After reflecting on this for a while, I realized that unrelenting silence and stillness had not always served me well. Yes, there are times when I do need to wait. But it seems to me that quiet is not a manifestation of true patience if I am stewing inside, and passivity is not a substitute for right action.

That raises the question of what constitutes right action. I'm not sure. I think that, at a minimum, it is action that is informed by respect -- respect for myself, respect for the other person, respect for the situation, respect for our planet.

I love to look up words in the dictionary, find out their roots, and unpack their meanings. Patience comes from a Latin word that means, "to suffer." Respect originates from two Latin words that mean, "to look again."

Being respectful -- looking again -- speaks to me of living in the present moment, letting go of past baggage, looking at the person in front of me with fresh eyes even if I have known them for years, asking myself what the situation is calling on me to do at this moment.

When I want to charge full steam ahead, slowing down and looking again does require patience. It feels to me like suffering.

Recently I have been noticing the importance of opposites. The letters of our alphabet can have meaning only because they are a combination of black squiggles and white spaces. If a sheet of paper was left blank, it would convey no meaning. Conversely, if the entire sheet was painted black, it would convey no more meaning. It is the combination of substance and emptiness that gives writing significance.

Bringing this back to Annie's post, I do not in any way want to suggest that it was “wrong.” In fact, I found it deeply moving. Rather it was that I needed to add another piece in order for it to make sense to me.

Using Annie's message and my own thoughts, I needed to compose a dance -- between Yin and Yang, between sound and silence, between what is and what is not, between action and inaction.

Now that I have done that, I feel at peace.

Mrs. Nice Guy

"Uh oh. There are a couple of guys walking towards me. If I'm to maintain my image of myself as a nice person, I'll step to one side and make way from them. But my homework assignment is to practise operating in my least favourite mode. So, this time, I'm going to keep walking and force them to make way for me. Oh my God, I'm a total jerk. Oh, but look at that. They made way for me. Nothing terrible happened."

What was that all about? It was my homework assignment from the second day of my workshop entitled Essential Communication Skills in Conflict at Vancouver Island University. The assignment called on me to practice using my least favourite conflict resolution style, which in my case was competition.

One of the big Ahas I had that day was that there are no good or bad conflict resolution styles. Rather, each one has its uses. Each is helpful in some situations and unhelpful in others.

Each style can be measured by its levels of assertiveness and cooperation. Another big Aha for me was that a conflict resolution style could be highly assertive as well as highly cooperative. My previous thinking had been that assertiveness and cooperation were mutually exclusive.

Here’s a run-down of the styles:

Avoidance
Assertiveness – Low
Cooperation – Low
Behaviour – You do not engage.
Uses – When you are in imminent danger.

Accommodation
Assertiveness – Low
Cooperation – High
Behaviour – You give the other person what they want, and sacrifice what you want.
Uses – When there is little time for discussion, when it’s a one-off situation, and when the outcome is unimportant to you.

Compromise
Assertiveness - Medium
Cooperation – Medium
Behaviour – Each of you gets some of what you want, and each of you sacrifices some of what you want.
Uses – When attempts at collaboration have failed and there is insufficient time to discuss things further, the best you may be able to achieve is compromise.

Competition
Assertiveness – High
Cooperation – Low
Behaviour – You get what you want, and sacrifice nothing.
Uses – In an emergency, when there is little or no time for discussion, someone needs to take charge.

Collaboration
Assertiveness – High
Cooperation – High
Behaviour – Both of you get what you want, and neither of you sacrifices anything.
Uses – If you have the time to pursue it, collaboration produces win-win decisions, to which the stakeholders have a high level of commitment.

Traditionally, my conflict resolution style leant towards avoidance and accommodation. Since I have bought into Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community and have been learning about consensus decision making and nonviolent communication, I have grown better at compromise and collaboration. I’m still uncomfortable about being competitive. But watch out –- I’m practising.

"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice

Today I participated in the first half of a two-day workshop called Essential Communication Skills in Conflict, which was designed by the Justice Institute of British Columbia and delivered at Vancouver Island University here in Nanaimo.

Our instructor encouraged us to choose an anchor word that we would say to ourselves when our emotional buttons were pushed and we felt ourselves getting angry. She said her own anchor was, "Be curious." Although she said we were free to choose different anchors for ourselves, I actually liked hers and decided to stick with it. Approaching a situation with an enquiring mind helps us to avoid being judgemental.

Earlier in the week, I had confronted a friend by saying, "I feel hurt because you did such and such." At the time, I felt proud of myself for raising the topic at all, as it had involved overcoming my reluctance to bring up a difficult subject.

Secondly, I thought I was doing well, because I started out by saying, "I feel ......." But the second part of my sentence -- because you did such and such -- turned it into blame.

Fortunately the conversation went well and the issue was cleared up. I attribute that to my friend's excellent communication skills, which turned the conversation in a positive direction.

I'm still glad I raised the issue. Although my delivery wasn't perfect, at least it was better than allowing my resentment to build. But, with the benefit of some conflict resolution coaching behind me, I now would start out by saying, "I wonder if you could tell me more about such and such, because I didn't know what you meant by doing it, and I'm feeling confused."