The Skill of Staying

Unskillfulness, conflict and difficulty are necessary and unavoidable parts of life. The desire to be pure and good and nice can often lead us into realms of isolation and rigidity that diminish our lives beneath a façade of religious and social righteousness. Real life is messy, emergent and participatory—not to mention fun, fascinating and terrifying!

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about relationships the past week as I explore how we might be able to heal some of the deep divides in our country that have been so evident over the past four years. How do we initiate and maintain genuine relationships with people who we see as very different from us? Of course, when we look closely or when we live with another person for any length of time, we often discover that every other human being is very different from us.

One of the primary skills for authentic relationship that I’ve noticed is capacity to stay, even when it gets difficult. Staying does not mean just staying physically, but finding a way to stay engaged, or return to engagement when we have left, while the messy business of life works itself out through us.

I’m less and less impressed with our human agency in working things out. Problem solving, empathy and listening are wonderful and necessary skills, but the real resolution feels like it comes, when it does come, from a more mysterious place. It’s almost like our job is simply to stick around with as much compassion and courage as we can muster while life does what life does. But it’s incredibly challenging to stay in the heat of disagreement long enough to melt down into some new and truer alloy.

Having been in a marriage for many decades now, I can’t tell you the number of times I have found myself in the middle of a difficult place with my partner and felt utterly hopeless against whatever issue was dividing us. There are places we go where it is simply self-evident that there is no way forward—no solution—no resolution possible. But again and again, as we are able to hang out in that place of no resolution with some modicum of goodwill, something shifts. Maybe not right away. Maybe not till after many tears, accusations and realizations, but, if we are resolute and patient, something new emerges.

This is not the same as compromise which is where I give something and you give something and neither one of us is happy but neither one of us is totally disappointed. Sometimes that is necessary – mostly around the small stuff. But in matters of the heart and soul, something more creative is necessary.

Real staying means that I have to show up as my full self and you have to show up as your full self. Trying to take care of the other person by being ‘nice’ turns out to be a barrier that needs to be breached. If I give up myself to try to placate you, then something new is prevented from arising.

So I’m trying to notice what keeps me from showing up as myself—what stops my willingness to express my point of view as valued part of the situation. I’m also working to become more aware of the assumptions about others prevent me from hearing the truth beneath positions and opinions that are strange to me.

I wish to help create a world where we all get to show up as ourselves and are continually willing to release our certainty in service of the emerging life that reveals itself anew through us.