I am noticing more and more that people like to disagree. I am not sure why that is and when I look back on my life I certainly loved disagreements too. Not consciously of course. No one is consciously looking to get into a fight, but I have always enjoyed a good tussle. It usually involved religion or politics. Some moral anyhow. It was a rush coming up with reasonable arguments in order to change the persons mind so that the world can be saved.
Looking back though I now see that as fun as it might have been, it really does little to change anything. The parties that enter into a heated debate over anything don’t wish to think any differently than they did before. It is rarely about the argument and more about exercising their autonomy.
So today I take the high road. I avoid arguments all together. I’m not a doormat. I will speak up if there is something wrong. After all as Edmund Burke put it, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to say and do nothing. But we are not surrounded by evil. Yes, it is still with us, but not in our daily conversations.
In our daily conversations it is important to take the high road.
I’m also learning that some people are more broken than others. People try to take their bad day out on you. They try to get into a fight or win an argument to compensate for something else entirely. In the end nothing ever changes and the two people end up walking away hating each other and grumbling under their breath.
So the high road it must be.
The road that makes no judgements and doesn’t get excited one way or another. It is not easy. We all have feelings and triggers, but life is so much better without fights and arguments in it.
I ask myself how important something is to me, how valuable is this exchange, and how will the relationship remain when the exchange is over? There is an old polish proverb that I discovered recently and wrote about in my Quintessential Quotables series. It simply says, not my monkey – not my circus.
I find myself using it a lot. This is no my monkey and this is not my circus. It’s none of my business and there is no reason to get emotionally wrapped up in something that will not add a single meaningful minute to my life.
Life is too short to get tangled up in silly things.
Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@haughters
