The art of #diplomacy is marked by building bridges that accommodate more than one vision, while also considering the factors that affect flexibility for sustainability in order to move and rebound well with the natural ongoing shifts of an earthly existence. This understanding is missed or underutilized by those who prefer high-brow, deferring, and authoritative decrees. Anger is strangling our culture just as much as the dilution of taboos and ritual have muddled how we identify with what it means to be a part of a recognized nation. Few productive decisions are made from the #emotions of fear, anger, and despair. Few #meaningful decisions are made when there is a lack of understanding and a deferral of allowing any part of our (and others’) experiences to be held sacred. Revolutions must have deeply rooted intentions and strategy to be more than a coup that destroys what is demonized or the experience of impulsive possession replays again and again, negating a re-found stability for healing that secures an environment for creative progress.
Emotional disregulation occurs in society because of the emotional disregulation in many individuals over time, culminating in a massive series of responses. It is easy to forget in the milieu of emotions and defiant opinions surging for the sake of self-righteousness to weaken, cut off, and demean some of the people and relationships in your life. These relationships may have held a sense of safety and reliability, of playfulness and inspiration, and of compassion and acceptance, even if you don’t see eye to eye all the time. Self-righteous opinions can easily make you forget these beneficial parts of relating when the wave of collective reactivity has swept up all your thoughts and you aren’t even keeping tabs on more than the divisive topic of the moment, in the name of having a voice in #democracy.
Respect for other’s opinions beyond your own is the true challenge of democracy. Finding creative solutions that honor the majority and the minority through methodical, exhaustive #negotiations is the art of diplomacy. Every change you want to see in the world can be advocated and hindered by the capacity to understand and agree to trade-offs. Ideals only get you half way. The one who chooses ideals over reality will starve every day for what they are painstakingly demanding of a reality they are unwilling to take part in. Let your ideals and values inform you of how you want to work with the reality of your environment by acknowledging your relationship to it.
Relationships require tending and acceptance of changes that are inevitable and of knowns or unknowns that arise to challenge the agreements within those #relationships. You can find ways to plan for these changes or be shocked by them through ignorance. Attention and interest to know more than you think you know is what enables human innovation and evolution. This is directly applicable to your relationships with others and your relationship to the environment of human societies on this earth. Negotiation and compensation with gains and losses is a part of every moment in life, no matter how simple or complex. Mitigating the degree of damage, we are responsible for in the short and long term, is only achieved with clarity beyond emotional reactivity, honorable intention, and resolute but compassionate #attentiveness to as many of the concerns that we have the power to know at that time.
The curiosity and concern for the unknowns with a willingness to embrace contingency plans are also essential. If one has no interest in the emotions of others, they have missed a big part of connection, growing with others, and the depth of meaning that emotion sustains. If one has no interest in knowing more and only the focus of their emotional impulses, they have missed the opportunity to secure productive outcomes over immediate gratification. One cannot simplify personal attachments to belief structures into laws for everyone and expect to create a functional world through the illusion of despotic control. Life is diverse. The human mind and the everchanging reality of our understanding of existence is not set in stone. Even if it were, stone crumbles and disperses over time or from catalytic events.
The arguments one is willing to consider and the battles one is willing to fight all come back to an individual’s understanding and/or fear of Time. While a human life is brief by comparison to the many generations of a nation’s livelihood, the identity of a society’s existence is brief compared to the evolution of civilizations. We cannot help but see Time as highly personal due to the wager of mortality. Expanding our concerns to the 7 generations that come after us requires negotiation of personal desires with appreciation and compassion that guards future opportunities for the fulfillment of our descendants. The more broken and unyielding we are in our relationships to #family and #community because of self-righteousness without broader integration, in a co-creative context, the more fractured society becomes.
The interests of micro-tribal mindsets are just as tenuous as herd mentality and self-sacrificial hive mind perspectives. It is up to us, in each of these explorations of identity, #values, and subsistence, to acknowledge when negotiations are required that do not compromise but rather strengthen the capacity for co-existence that come with the diversity of individuals as a collective. This challenges all of us to be mindful of the balance between belonging and separation. It challenges us to refine our sense of meaning and perceptions of allowance in the recipe for unity, with every opportunity to create it.
Priorities are often the primary filters for personal and impersonal gains and losses. Refining #precision in one’s priorities for #idealism when observing a changing landscape in the context of #reality is imperative. By choosing the effort this requires, one enables the opportunity for #discernment, strategic evaluation, and more acceptable outcomes when weighing gains and losses. As these trade-offs are weighed in hindsight, the mutuality of satisfaction for oneself and the collective, as well as the acknowledgment of maturity through the cultivation of valuable skills for optimal perpetuation in the experience of life is made apparent. This builds esteem for continued #curiosity, #creativity, and meaning for existence. These cultivated #teachings are worth passing onto those who come after you, with gratitude for what you learned from those that came before you, while trusting in your ability, in the now, to make #decisions that safeguard and steward longevity in the preciousness of #humanity in a shared relationship with the Earth.
Excerpts From the Writings of Julie Hightman
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