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Surrender
Chapter 18 of The
Anatomy of Peace
By The Arbinger Institute
Editor’s note: The
Anatomy of Peace, an important new book by the writers of Leadership
and Self-Deception, shows us the cause of human conflict so that
we can learn to live in peace. Look for the continuation next Monday.
Yusuf tilted
his head down to intercept Lou’s far away gaze. “I know that look,”
he said. “It’s how I look when I possess
no real conviction that things can ever get better. It is the look
of despair and surrender.”
Lou took that in and considered it.
“Yeah, I suppose that is how I’m feeling,” he conceded.
“It’s a seductively powerful feeling,”
Yusuf continued, “this feeling of despairing
surrender. But it’s a lie.”
Lou suddenly perked up. “How
so?”
“Because it’s assuming something that
isn’t true.”
“What?”
“It’s assuming that you’re stuck —
that you’re doomed to continue suffering as you have been.”
This was, in fact, what Lou was feeling.
He slumped again in his chair.
“Just a moment ago, Lou,” Yusuf
began, “you said that you were the mess. Not others,
but you.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel
better?” Lou asked forlornly.
“No,” Yusuf
responded, “but it should give you hope.”
“How so?”
“Because if you are the mess, you can
clean it. Improvement doesn’t depend on others.”
“But what if the mess isn’t purely
mine,” Lou responded sullenly. “What if the people around me are
just as messed up as I am?”
Yusuf couldn’t
help himself: “Then you have a huge problem,” he laughed out loud
“Tell me about it.” Lou shook his head
pathetically.
“Actually, I’m mostly joking, Lou,”
Yusuf continued.
“Mostly,” Elizabeth
noted with a smile.
“Yes,” Yusuf
agreed, “mostly. Because even if it’s the case that everyone at
Zagrum is deeply messed up, it’s still
a hopeful situation.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because your despair is being invited
by another lie. You’re assuming that nothing you can do will change
them.”
“But that’s true,” Lou countered. “Nothing
I do can change them.”
“Quite right.”
“Then I don’t understand your point.”
“That’s because you surrendered too
early,” Yusuf smiled. “While it’s true we can’t make others
change, we can invite them to change. After all, didn’t Mei
Li help to change Jenny?”
Lou thought about Mei Li’s story. “Yes,
I suppose she did.”
Yusuf paused
briefly. “Because we are each responsible for our blaming, self-justifying
boxes,” he continued, “we can each be rid of them. There are no victims so far as
the box is concerned, only self-made ones. And since by getting
out of the box we invite the same in others, we are not even victims
with respect to others the way we believe we are when we’re in the
box. We can begin inviting others to make the changes they need
to make. In fact, that is what the best leaders and parents do.
So if you surrender, Lou, you surrender to a lie. Your box will
win.”
“Then how?” Lou asked. “How can I fight
this box I’m in?”
“The same way fought his and I’m fighting
mine.”
“How?” Lou
repeated.
“I think it might help to hear more
of Avi’s story,” Yusuf
said.
At that, Avi
stood back up. “So,” he began again, “the Arizona
outback in the summer of ’78.”
Lou listened as Avi
recounted his initial meeting with Yusuf,
their early battles, Avi’s anger at everything around him — the hills, the streams,
the trees, the earth.
“But everything began to change for
me,” Avi continued, “during a late-night
conversation with Yusuf under a clear
star-laden sky. We were about two weeks into the program at the
time, and I’d barely said a word to anyone. ‘You know,’ Yusuf
said to me, as I was lying on my back looking at the stars, ‘it’s
the same night sky we see from Jerusalem.’
“I hesitated. But then I said, ‘Yeah
— the Big Dipper, the Polar Star. I remember my dad teaching me
all about them.’
“At that, I recall Yusuf
sitting down next to me. It might have been the first time I didn’t
feel to pull away.
“He said, ‘Tell me about your father,
Avi.’ And I remember launching into a
flood of memories from my childhood: how my father took me on walks
every day from as early as I can remember; how he taught me the
history of our people; how he played soccer with me at the park;
how he always cooked Saturday breakfast; how I loved to travel with
him on his surveying jobs; how he always read to me before I went
to bed. It was like a dam broke within me and my memories burst
free. All my love for my father, the pain of his
loss, and the sadness for no longer having him in my life burst
through the box that had been confining my heart. My chest
heaved at the loss I had suffered and at what I was then suddenly
recovering: a longing to be with my father.
“Yusuf just
sat there with me and listened. Although he couldn’t have known
it, he was something of a surrogate for my father that night. If
I couldn’t be with my father, it was at least helpful to be with
someone after nearly five years of barricading myself from
the world. That night was the beginning of my healing. And I will
forever be grateful that it happened at the invitation of an Arab.
For the blame I had heaped upon the Arab people for my father’s
death somehow became difficult to maintain when it was an Arab who
helped reintroduce me to my father.
“When I awoke the next morning, I willingly
joined in with the others and helped with breakfast. This was a
first for me. We then broke camp and began our day’s journey through
the bush. I remember the morning’s hike well because it was the
first day on the trail that I allowed myself to enjoy.
“Over the days that followed, the memories
of another flooded my mind: Hamish. What a friend he had been! How
gracious, pure, and good he had been to me. And I, so wicked! He
had come to me in my moment of great loss, knowing how deeply I
must be hurting, and wanting in some small way to help me bear my
pain. He had come as an angel of comfort and good will, and I cast
him out.”
Avi reached
up and wiped at his cheek.
“And as if that wasn’t enough, I vilified
him — with every vile word I knew. I blamed him — the person remaining
in my life that perhaps loved me most besides my mother — for my
father’s death. Him! The bearer of mercy and love. The young boy stuck between two
nations — Arab by birth and Israeli by citizenship. The boy who
in the days his blood family was attacking his country, and perhaps
needed comfort most of all, came to offer his comfort to me and
received pain in return for his merciful gift — mean, loathsome,
pain.
“Oh Hamish!
I cried within as I walked. What can I ever do to repay you —
to belatedly return your gift in kind, to help you to bear the pain
I have heaped upon you, and to erase the bitterness I have inevitably
invited within?”
Avi wiped
once more at his cheek.
“This question settled upon me as I
trekked over the coming days. On another clear
evening some ten days or so after the first, I again sat with Yusuf.
This time I told him about my friend Hamish, and my violent turning
away. The telling was cathartic, as I had never uttered a word of
it to anyone until that moment. I had of course spent the recent
days replaying the events in my mind, but until I was willing to
allow another to see my transgression, I was still holding on to
and hiding it. My telling turned out to be part of the healing.
“Part, but not all.For
the telling nourished within me the seed that had been looking to
take hold and grow: I knew in the telling that it wasn’t enough
in this case merely to feel sorry. Seeing Hamish as I once again
did, I felt the desire and need to reach out to him.
“‘What can I do for him?’ I asked Yusuf.
“‘Do you feel the need to do something
for him?’ he asked.
“‘It is what my heart is telling me,
yes,’ I answered.
“‘Then what do you feel to do?’
“‘That’s what I am asking you,’
I responded.
“‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but it is your life
and your friend and your heart, is it not? I cannot tell you what
you need to do. Only you would know that.’
“Then what? I wondered to myself.
“‘Maybe you should ponder the question
as you walk over the coming days,’ Yusuf
said, as if reading my thoughts.
“And I did. On the third morning, we
came upon a spectacular plant called a century plant. Its stalk
was probably thirty feet tall. The century plant lives fifteen to
twenty-five years. However, it shoots up a stalk and flowers only
in the last year of its life. The energy it takes to grow the stalk
ends up killing the plant. When the stalk falls over, it showers
seeds on the ground, giving life to a new generation. The low-lying
base of the plant is commonly seen in the deserts of Arizona
and elsewhere. But the once-in-a-lifetime nature of the stalk, and
its determination to grow skyward from rocky, dry soil, lends it
an air of authority and hope. Because of the seeds it cradles, every
stalk that rises offers the desert the promise of future life.
“I had learned about the plant since
joining the survival course and had seen various specimens over
the first few weeks. This time, however, when I happened upon one
in full flower, something hit me: I had received the gift of a
once-in-a-lifetime friend; a friend and friendship that had flourished
despite the difficulty of the environment in which we lived. It
was of course a friendship that lived close to the ground — like
the base of the century plant, mostly unnoticed. Yet before it could
come of age and shoot its flower skyward as a beacon of hope to
the desert, I had hacked at its roots and condemned it to death.
Towering before me was a surrogate: this plant was now rising as
Hamish and I could have risen had I not deserted him.
“I reached up to the lowest of its
branches and snapped off a seed. I wrapped up the seed,
symbolic both of what I had killed and what I hoped yet could rise
to life, and placed it in my pocket. That evening, I laid my soul
bare in a letter to Hamish, apologizing for my inhumanity toward
him and for the pain I had inevitably caused. I offered the seed
as a symbol both of what we once had and of what I hoped we could
yet recover.
“I didn’t know whether Hamish or his
family still lived in the same little home, but his house number
was my only connection to the life I had once known with him. The
weekly mail run arrived in our camp two days later. My letter and
the century plant’s seed started its journey from the desert soils
of Arizona to the deserts of the Middle East, hopefully to find a young Palestinian Arab still in good
health and retaining a spirit that had not been irretrievably damaged
by the violence of some years before.”
At that, Avi
stopped.
“So what happened?” Gwyn asked. “Did
you hear from Hamish?”
“No,” he said. “I never heard from
him.”
There was the hint of a gasp in the
room, as this revelation was neither what they had expected nor
hoped.
“That’s sad,” Gwyn said. “Do you know
what happened to him?”
“Yes. I have learned since that his
family moved about two years after I came to the States. They moved
to the north of Israel to a town called Maalot-Tarshiha.
But he was killed about five years later. He was among the civilians
killed by rocket attacks from Lebanon prior to the Lebanon
War of 1982.”
“Oh how sad,” Gwyn whispered.
“Yes,” Avi
nodded as he looked down at the ground.
“Did he ever receive your letter?”
Elizabeth asked.
Avi shook
his head. “I don’t know. There’s no way to know.” He looked back
up at the group. “I didn’t learn of his whereabouts until after
his death.”
“What a pity if he never received it,”
Carol said.
“Yes,” Avi
agreed, his face slack with sorrow. “I
wonder about it all the time — about the pain I caused him and about
whether my letter helped to relieve it in any way.”
“But writing the letter helped you,”
Pettis offered.
“By helping to heal my own heart, you
mean?” Avi asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “Even if
the letter didn’t reach Hamish, it reached me. That’s true. It was
for me an outward expression of an inward recovery of friendship.
Hamish may not have received it, but in writing it I finally received
him and began to receive others like him.”
“Like Arabs, you mean?” Gwyn asked.
“Like Yusuf and others?”
“Yes. And Americans and Jews and my family and myself — everyone
I had gone to war against. For you see, every human face includes
all others. This means that I spite my own face with every nose
I desire to cut off. We separate from each other at our own peril.”
Copyright © 2006 by
The Arbinger Institute
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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