The Wisdom of Events

Transcript

This is how your life is already wonderful.

I’d like to talk to you about the wisdom of events.

Wisdom contained within events, our own experiences and how we can interpret them and find out how to be better just by looking at these Quotidian occurrences.

The other day I joined a certain group on Telegram. I won’t mention the name of the group but its a group with hundreds of members on it and I went in there and I was trying to give people some advice or some information that I knew. Something I have quite a lot of experience in and somehow I ended up getting in a conflict with someone in the group.

I was trying to make sure the information was correct and I thought my intentions were pure and I thought I was being quite accommodating to the other person in this conflict.

She just continued to get more and more agitated as I tried to correct this information.

And then I notice other people in the group were saying these things like “Oh there seems to be a lot of anger going on around her” And she was like “Yeah there’s a lot of ego.”

I thought “Oh maybe I am the problem here” or maybe they think I am the problem. I said “I apologize, I didn’t mean to be aggressive. My intention was to try to make sure the information is correct so people can follow the right path so they don’t get misled.

Later watching this group I kinda took a little step back and I watched the group again and saw how people interacted and a few days later I noticed a similar problem where she was getting into contact with someone.

That’s so interesting because when I first saw what was happening I thought the person who said there was a lot of anger, I thought perhaps this person was criticizing me especially after she agreed with him.

But no this time they were actually trying to give a subtle hint to her. That was the thing. I thought it was about me, I thought people were against me but no that was my mistake in interpreting what was going on. Also her mistake. She had such a strong frame, very firm with her convictions in her mind.

Which is kind of admirable quality, it depends how you apply it. She was so firm she was correct that she would interpret other people trying to give her hints as actually criticizing her opponents. People were on my side but they were trying to give her these hints.

This is important too because of course people were saying in the subtle way cause they didn’t want to criticize her directly in a public forum. They were trying to follow this gentleman’s rule of criticizing people in private. But they didn’t go all the way from what I can tell, they still did in public but tried to be subtle about it.

That’s the problem if you’re subtle and people are very firm about it, maybe they won’t get the hint.

That’s the problem so I decided to send her a message myself to try to be tactful and explain what is going on so I sent her this message saying “You know here I could see, I invite you to reflect how you might be causing conflict or friction within this group. For example you said this, you said you responded to this person for saying thanks for your aggression. Now I suspect you weren’t actually thanking him, you were being sarcastic. Of course sarcasm is not conducive to a productive conversation. Perhaps you could reflect on these things.”

I don’t think I offered her an alternative for communicating which would have been a good thing to do and occurred to me later and she said “You know that guy was a jackass, some people just won’t listen. I am done with this conversation.”

I said “Maybe reflect on the consequences of continuing on the same path of ignoring feedback. What do you think will happen if you continue like this? What is it going to be like for you on the inside, what will it be like for the group?

And I said farewell and I blocked her because she had already told me the conversation was over. Maybe if I block her that will make her disappear from the group and I thought that is what had happened cause I didn’t see her in the group for another couple of days then I did see her and she was much more subdued. I thought she was blocked, interestingly she was actually reflecting on what I had told her.

Sometimes when you do offer someone criticism and you do it tactfully and they respond defensively, you might think there’s no getting through.

Sometimes they have that ego on the surface and they don’t want to admit they are reflecting on what you are telling them, or specially they are not reflecting in the moment and later things start to kick in and they start to notice their errors.

Here’s another thing, something very important. The way I explained it to her I didn’t make a lot of valued judgements and there’s not a lot of preaching or moralizing I just said “You know I think this is what happened and I think it has certain negative consequences to it.”

And this again I like to refer to this passage in the Bible where Jesus Christ says to us “First remove the log from your own eye then you can remove the speck easily from another person’s eye.”

When I mention this to people they say now who could be so enlightened? Does it take a saint or a great teacher or a holy man like Jesus Christ to have that level of communication?

I say “No this is something quite simple, easy.”

I don’t claim to be a master but I know this is possible, I have seen it. When we can be aware of our own emotions and aware of our own biases we can begin to become objective and communicate clearly.

We can be authentic and objective at once in our communication and our criticism and then others will take it on board.

Once again I will mention I recommend those discourses and workshops from Marshall Rosenberg on Spotify which are excellent.

Anyway those are some interesting thoughts. The thing is this simple interaction there is so much wisdom to be gained as I reflected later in my journal. So many things, so many occurrences that happen to us. Little things that go wrong or that go right we can wonder what can I learn from that?

What is the wisdom of events?