Being Kind When Being Kind is Hard

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

I am not a patient person, but I’m also not a malicious one so I’m not naming names or specifying personhood.

There are certain people or situations that are outside your control, or my control, or anyone’s control. But last week, I saw a decades old confrontation bubble up to the surface. The confrontation did not involve me, but because I am near it often enough I can see the complexity of the issue. I can imagine how deep the animosity and hurt run. I can understand too, that the easiest path is to ignore the confrontation, to let the tension hang heavily, indefinitely. I can see how both parties involved point to the other person as the sole cause of the animosity, but as my high school sex-ed teacher told us, “it takes two to tango.”

Sometimes life smashes two people together who are so dramatically different that they seem irreconcilable. Their reasons for doing things are so dramatically different that they end up hurting each other. The reasons, whatever they are, get lost in translation and cease to matter. Addressing the reasons would be the best but most difficult path. Because people are prone to avoiding difficulty, we skirt the issues forever until they nearly swallow us whole.