How to Achieve Lasting Peace: Mastering the Art of Reconciliation

To err is human; to forgive, divine; to reconcile, a gift.

___

“The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.” — Nhat Hanh

Many people think of reconciliation as sucking it up: giving in to someone’s demands to secure some on their own list, losing autonomy, sacrificing a cherished principle or even self-respect for the sake of forced peace. While the word means “the restoration of friendly relations,” synonyms include pacification, appeasement, placating, and compromise. But those aspects of resolution are not true reconciliation; they characterize détente, a tense stalemate between powerful enemies held in place by the threat of mutually assured destruction. True reconciliation involves laying down your arms and is defined by forgiveness. To achieve reconciliation, you must go beyond making peace with your adversary and make peace, too, with your own anger and negativity over whatever it was that started the fight, then stop trumpeting the past as proof of your antagonist’s mean spirit, stubborn wrongheadedness, and fault for the conflict or rift. Clinging to the past pulls past into present and prevents you from living in, enjoying, and appreciating the present moment and all it has to offer.

♦◊♦

Here are two examples from my own life—one professional and one personal—of my education in the meaning and mechanics of reconciliation and my path to understanding that failure to detach from the past can color the present and darken the future. I used to work in sales, and anyone who’s ever done that knows that no good salesperson gets credit or more commissions by repeating, “Hey, remember that quarter five years ago when I beat the numbers?” Your past successes are your past successes, and leaving them behind gives you the freedom to leave your past failures back there with them and focus on present accomplishments and planning for future achievements. The other example is the father of a former girlfriend. He was at the time a hardcore Yankee fan who loved to listen to baseball games on his radio, even while sitting at the dinner table. In the late 1980’s, after Sony had come out with the Walkman and replaced the ill-fitting single earpiece with comfortable stereo headphones, he still listened to those games on his ancient transistor, snapped into its worn leather case and clapped hard against one ear. The old radio may have had a sentimental association for him, but it struck me that by clinging to that obsolete object and its poor sound quality, he was unconsciously sacrificing his enjoyment of his beloved ball games, which he could have heard much more clearly on a new set of headphones.

♦◊♦

Reconciliation is not easy and requires a shift in thinking to push past our fears. We’re often afraid we will lose too much—our pride, the respect of others, our standing, and our own self-respect—by reconciling, particularly with spouses, significant others, and family members. Positions become hardened over time, fortifications and defenses are built and expanded, and with each passing day, month, and year, it grows more difficult to tear these down and let another person in, because we’ve invested so much time and energy in keeping that person out. This investment is known in the financial world as sunk costs—money you’ve put in and are never going to get back. But in the emotional world, you can recover your investment and multiply it many times, turning loss into gain by giving the gift of true reconciliation and forgiveness. Reconciliation requires healthy measures of vulnerability and trust. And the peace dividend—losing the cost of maintaining those walls, turrets, missile silos, and satellite shields—pays handsomely. You will find yourself suddenly free to share your new-found wealth, not only with the person you’ve reconciled with, but with others in your life whom you’ve been ignoring, shutting out, or even refusing to see either as a form of punishment for your adversary or because they took your adversary’s side.

There’s also a physiological block to reconciliation that can be difficult to overcome. The part of the brain that thinks we’re giving in and losing if we reconcile is a primitive one. It thrives on the stuff that lives in the primeval muck of our gray matter—hubris, vengeance, stoicism, and most of all, fear. The fear of loss, particularly if we’ve suffered severe losses or damage such as abuse earlier in life, overwhelms us, and we cling to the coping mechanisms and ingrained behaviors we’ve developed to be able to bear these losses and go on with our lives. But we lose so much more by clinging to our unhealthy patterns and closing off worlds of possibility, forgoing moments of joy and elation, while blaming others for our self-induced misery. Reconciliation can’t erase the past. But it can put the past in perspective, and like the first two-point perspective drawing you attempted in art class, the one with the road vanishing into the distance, it places you at the other end of that road, the far end, walking, then breaking into a run towards someone you love and have always loved. Life is short, and at some point, the road ends for all of us. Master the art before it’s too late, and give someone the rewarding gift of reconciliation—even if that someone is yourself.

This article has been adapted from a post previously published on the blog, Tom Aplomb.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons