Facing down dark days?
Change is the only constant in life, change brings the good and the bad, they can be positive or negative depending on your distance from them and your perspective, the only guarantee is that change is always coming. Which means that we all have to face dark days eventually, life is not neat, it does not get better in tidy little packages of marginal gain, it is a series of mountains and valleys where you are foolishly walking the direct cross-sectional of peaks and troughs. Life will take you up and drop you down, everything will be sunshine one moment and violent storms the next. It is for this that we must prepare with the certainty that is going to happen to us, we all have to face dark days.
Dark days when we think the world has gone insane, when we do not understand the thinking of people around us, friends have seemed to have abandoned common sense and decency, when we have to stand alone in our convictions and beliefs. It is when the only ground upon which you can rely is the patch beneath your feet. You can of course pretend to agree, consent to ignore the fear that drives the actions of others, you can meet their fear with anger and play the game of one-upmanship of outbidding each other's fury, or you can meet that fear with love, not soft love, kindness or compassion, you can stand in defiance against anger with hard love, as a parent does protecting its child from its lack of road awareness, you can hold a hand tightly without harming them to show the strength of your love, you can be relentless in presenting a better path and you can judge your own actions with kind harshness in the pursuit of that love.
Love needs not to be limited, though it always needs to be matched by actions that are in alignment with it, as our actions always speak louder than our words. Love need not to be quiet, it can be loud, proud and stubborn, it has the strength to endure and bear repeating, something that anger cannot do, if someone speaks from a place of anger, if you suspect you are hearing it, ask the person to repeat it for clarification, even if you heard it clearly, because the chances are the person saying it did not, they were deafen to their own words by their anger. Again you do this from a place of love, not to trip them up or embarrass them, but simply to give them an opportunity to listen to what they said, it is after all difficult to speak and listen at the same time, everyone should have the opportunity to finesse what they have said and decide whether they actually agree with it, and take it as a compliment that they were able to say their first thought with you not the censored polite and thought out view of love.
That is the power of love, it enables elegant and skilful actions because it is trying to help people, not hurt them or prove to yourself that you are right. Love seeks understanding, that is why there is such power in restating what someone has said to you, to ensure that you have understood what they have said, to show that you were listening and if possible, you should always try to support and make their arguments stronger, before stating your own ideas.
This is known as strong-holding your opponent's (friend's) arguments, it is a distinguishing difference between those who just want to be right and people who want to know the truth, and which person would you rather talk to, someone who wants to work with you, to co-create a better understanding of the world, to be part of the journey towards truth. Rather than playing the immature game of who can be more right, who is the better arguer and debater, try and find the common ground. The other kind is not a game I am interested in playing and I do not want to be around people who do so, or at least, I do not want to discuss things that are important to me with those people, I will mind my own business with them, and they can mind theirs.
And that is fine as well, you can hold your opinions quietly as long as your actions are loud and in alignment with your beliefs. You can be strong in your values without having to persuade others to share them, it does not matter about the people building walls you disagree with, there are always ways them around and you can even show others how you bypassed them, you can make the walls ineffective by your actions. You can hold the idea that “the world is a city”, whilst all around you are telling you that we have to protect our village. You can practice the idea of helping others, when people are scared of scarcity, feeling a relevant and insecure, you do not have to persuade them that the world is full of abundance, you just have to act as if it is, then that very same fear of scarcity will drive them to seek the same thing that you already possess.
Even on the worst battlefields of our history, there has been people engaged in kindness whilst bullets flew over their heads, and not even just once but every time, there has always been priests, druids and medics in every skirmish and war throughout history, there to give comfort. People who acted in accordance with their own faith and beliefs, that it was possible to walk through the valley of the dead to give comfort to a dying soldier. And you get to make the same choice, when the world around you erupts into chaos and violence, you can have the conviction of peace and love that enables the most elegant and skilful action, just do not expect any medals or even the accolades of fellow soldiers. You just get to walk the path of love in the company of fear, anger and hatred.
Be inspired by them, if it was possible for those people to face down the dark days that surrounded them, imagine what is possible when you do so in your own life. A life that does not have war (and if you're reading this article, it probably does not), that has a lifetimes worth of education at your fingertips with just a touch of the mobile phone, that has healthcare, food and an abundance of consumer luxury. When people around you are losing their heads, are depressed by the news and angry at each other, you still get to choose your action, you are able to connect with love, you just have to make that choice and then act with elegance and skilfulness, even on the darkest of days.
