Staying Engaged

Sometimes all that is required to resolve an issue is genuine curiosity, some amusement, and a willingness to stay engaged.  I went into the kitchen last week to grab a snack and to let people know I had arranged a dance lesson for the folks in our house from a couple of noted teachers in our community.  Once there, though, it seemed apparent there was tension brewing.  I asked one of my housemates in the kitchen if anything was wrong.  She said she wanted to talk to me.  So I told her I would be sitting in the dining room eating my snack if she wanted to find me there.

She came and sat down, and within minutes a second woman also joined us with her dinner plate.  As it turns out, the thing that was upsetting the first woman was an interaction she had had a couple hours earlier with the second woman.  I could see that they both had a lot of charge so I asked them to tell me what happened, just the facts.  The first one began and before long the second one was correcting her with her version of the incident.  The emotional charge began leaking out all over the place.

Normally, I would connect with the charge and add to it with my own frustration about needing to fix it and mostly feeling inept.  This time I experimented with just staying with the facts, which allowed for a state of equanimity and a natural curiosity.  As the story unfolded, it began to emerge that there were several people involved as the incident centered around preparing a meal for the house.  Several of those people happened to wander through and added their own angle on the incident.  Each additional perspective added not only a new piece of information, thus filling out the story, they also added a richness to the story in the experience of retelling.  As each new piece was added, I would jokingly exclaim, “Ah, the plot thickens!”

With each new revelation, the charge was dissipating as our impromptu game of Clue became far more entertaining.  Finally a voice came from the other side of the wall, an adjacent room where another housemate was reading and listening.  He exclaimed, “I wasn’t even there and now it’s my fault?!”  At this point, we all just had to laugh.

After the laughter subsided, many of us recognized that [1] that everyone had done their part to have things be the way they were and no one had acted with bad intentions. At worst, some one(s) had acted thoughtlessly.; and [2] almost everyone’s actions were motivated by care.  We came to that realization by using a technique we picked up from Cindy which involved tracking down frame after frame of the “crime scene” and dissipating a whole bunch of charge along the way.  We got curious, we stayed engaged, and in the end we found more love than had been there before.