Flexibility reduces needless quarrelling among people
By Letter to the Editor on October 13, 2021.
Editor:
I think that over-emphasis on accuracy, correctness, or precision is a source of unnecessary anxieties, disputes, and divisions.
We waste countless hours fighting over trivial things, causing break-up of communities and relationships.
Fighting could be deadly when it comes to customs, ideologies, politics, and religious doctrines. Humans have killed each other even about clothes and other stupid small things. As time passes, many of those disputes begin to look silly. We are one family sharing the same space on a relatively small planet. Can we not get along without fighting? Can we not live with ambiguity until you can see it more clearly?
Japanese are sticklers for punctuality but we know how to live with ambiguity. We rarely say “No.” Instead, we say something like “Yeah, but.” A correct answer can wait if it causes a break-up of a relationship.
The Japanese language does not have definite articles or indefinite articles. So I had no idea what the fuss was all about when elected delegates in a church assembly spent many hours debating passionately if the Bible is a foundation or the foundation of faith.
It was at a United Church’s highest decision making court called “General Council.” Me? I would be happy if it is approximately close to whatever I believe in.
I don’t apologize for my views that are fuzzy on the edges because flexibility lets us avoid needless quarrel. We live in ambiguity for awhile until mist dissipates and an answer presents itself.
Time will tell. Why fight?
Everything is relative. A veterinarian’s examination room has a sign, “A year for a human is six years for a cat. When you go away for a week, your cat will miss you for six weeks.” One minute is just like a flash.
But two minutes silence at the Remembrance Day ceremony feels like eternity. When you get old, time flies away too fast. But when you are a teenager waiting for a girlfriend at a bus stop, time feels like forever. It’s all relative.
Time is uneven. Also there is no such thing as an absolutely straight line, because the earth is round.
The shortest straight line between point A to point B is curved. What seems like reality for you may not exist.
A star visible now could be billions of light-years away. So it could be billions of years old. It may no longer exist.
Nobody knows what’s real or true for sure. So why fight and hate people who think differently?
I am happy I live in Canada where we no longer burn a heretic at the stake.
Tadashi (Tad) Mitsui
Lethbridge
-1
It certainly is not helpful to have a “me/us-me/us-me/us’ society, for some or many, these days. An example, is myself, being from a Dutch, right wing, calvinist christian-raised background. I no longer attend, but we often chuckle at the number of different churches/schools in the area of this background. All believing they are holier, or more christian, than the others, or something, with all of the perceived ‘differences’?
Generally the people that insist that there is no need for “senseless quarreling” are the same people that insist that “lets sit down iron out our differences and then do it my way”.
So if you have a position and will not change, then there must be a compromise, right, its the only way not to quarrel. So, AlphaHouse/Old SCS employees want an SCS and literally a forever expanding Campus of assistance of Drug Addicts. The other side, insists, you made your bed, you chose drugs, lie in it till you get tired of it, and then rehab.
Sitting down with the Pro Free Ride to all Drug Addicts, group does not lead to compromise, does not lead to anything but “my way or the highway”.
If we extend that to Pro Life vs a woman’s right to choose, where do you see a middle of the road choice there? What about Guns? Republicans in the US are by far the most radical of the Religious yet an AK47 is their right and the compromise to that discussion is what? An air pistol?
I think you seek nirvana but what creates hate and a divide inevitably involves Religious Nutbars. I once had a staunch Roman Catholic girl helping me paint my garage. While we were painting, she blurted out ” that if you are not a Roman Catholic, then you are doomed to hell”. I found this interesting because we were not talking about Religion and there was no “intro” in the past conversation that would have created the segway.
So I asked her if she had been born into a Hindu family did she think that was God’s fault and he/she purposely made it so she was doomed to hell? What about all of the Muslims of the world? Did “God” doom them all from birth? No matter the logic used, there was no moving her. Catholics were put on the planet to convert everyone else or “to hell they go”! Strangely the same ethos applies to Muslims, seek Mohammed or you are toast, infidel! There is no compromise when dealing with the Religious!
So Mr Mitsui, picking out easy conversations, ie, discussing whom gets the only chocolate donut left, is one that fits your state of Nirvana and life would be good, as long as you never entered the hard discussions that have two answers! If you are a Religious Nutbar then the answer is simple, were doing Gods Work! Which is amusing, because it would appear he/she is the same person that created that hindu, in my example, who appears, according to the Nutbars, doomed to hell?
So in my uneducated capacity as a “flexible negotiator” where do you start the negotiations on “Doomed to Hell”? Is the negotiation the temperature?