The Anatomy of PEACE. RESOLVING THE HEART OF CONFLICT. The Arbinger Institute

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 goodwill, 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 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, when per¬haps he 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 to bear the pain I have heaped upon you, and to erase the bitterness I have inevitably invited within?"
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Avi wiped once more at his cheek.
"This question settled upon me as I trekked over the com¬ing 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 trans¬gression, 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 you should 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 spec¬tacular plant called a century plant. Its stalk was probably thirty feet tall. The century plant lives fifteen to twenty-five years. How¬ever, 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,
168 • FROM WAR TO PEACE
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 con¬nection 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 their journey from the desert soils of Arizona to the deserts of the Middle East, hopefully to find a
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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 where¬abouts 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
170 • FROM WAR TO PEACE
expression of an inward recovery of friendship. Hamish may not have received it, but in writing it I finally received him and be¬gan 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."
19 • Locating the Peace Within
"Lou," Avi said, "a few minutes ago you asked how you can get out of the boxes you find yourself in—out of the blame, the self-justification, the internal warring, the apparent stuckness."
"Yes," Lou said.
"From this story I've just shared, I'd like to highlight for you what I believe were the keys to my being released from the cap¬tivity of my own boxes—the getting-out-of-the-box process, as it were."
Lou nodded in both assent and anticipation.
"First of all," Avi began, "you need to realize something about the box. Since the box is just a metaphor for how I am in relationship with another person, I can be both in and out of the box at the same time, just in different directions. That is, I can be blaming and justifying toward my wife, for example, and yet be living straightforwardly toward Yusuf, or vice versa. Given the hundreds of relationships I have at any given time, even if I am deeply in a box toward one person, I am nearly always out of the box toward someone else."
"Okay," Lou said pensively, wondering why this might be significant.
"Which is why," Avi continued, "we can recognize we are in the box to begin with. When we are noticing we are in the box, it is because we are noticing that we aren't feeling and seeing in one direction like we are in another. We are able to recognize the difference because the difference is within us. Which is to say that we have out-of-the-box places within us—relationships
171
172 • FROM WAR TO PEACE
and memories that are not twisted and distorted by blame and self-justification."
"Okay," Lou said, "but what does that have to do with get¬ting out of the box when we're feeling stuck?"
"It has to do with it because it means we are not stuck."
"Huh?"
"Think of that night with Yusuf under the stars," Avi con¬tinued. "It turns out that I had a wealth of out-of-the-box mem¬ories regarding my father. Once I allowed myself to find my way to those memories, a lot of things started to look and feel different."
"But you could have made your way to those memories any time in the prior five years but evidently didn't," Lou said. "What made you do it that night?"
"Good question," Avi responded. "I've asked myself the same thing many times."
"And?"
"And I think the answer lies in the ideas Mei Li and Mike shared with us — ideas that were embedded in the efforts Yusuf made with me and the others who were on the survival course. Remember how Mei Li talked about the importance of doing everything in her power to make the environment invitational toward peace? That is one of our precepts here. The biggest help in finding my way forward and out of the box was finding an out-of-the-box place, or vantage point, within me. In order to give me the best chance at finding such a vantage point within me, Yusuf helped to create an out-of-the-box place around me."
"And how did he do that?"
"By first being out of the box toward me himself. For you see, when he approached me that night under the stars, the conversa¬tion never would have gone as it did had I felt the blame of his box over the preceding days. I was like Jenny, and Yusuf was like
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Mike and Mei Li. I was looking to take offense at slights real and imagined. When real offenses wane, however, it gets increasingly harder to keep manufacturing them in one's mind. Despite my early resistance toward Yusuf, he didn't resist me back. He helped to create for me, as it were, an out-of-the-box place—a vantage point from where I could ponder my life in a new way free from the blame and self-justification of the box. When I remembered in that way, I was free to remember a past that my blaming self- justification had kept me from remembering. I was free to see a different past along with a different present and future. I was freed from the limitations and distortions of the box."
"So what is the getting-out-of-the-box process you alluded to earlier?" Lou asked.
"I've already given you the first two parts," Avi answered. At that, Avi turned to the board and wrote the following:
RECOVERING INNER CLARITY AND PEACE
(FOUR PARTS)
Getting out of the box
1. Look for the signs of the box (blame, justification, horribilization, common box styles, etc.).
2. Find an out-of-the-box place (out-of-the-box relationships, memories, activities, places, etc.).
"First," Avi said, as he turned from the board, "I should be on the lookout for blame and justification—for the signs that I might be in a box. I can be on the lookout for signs of the vari¬ous common boxes, for example—ways I'm feeling better-than, or entitled, or worse-than, or anxious to be seen-as.
"Then when I feel stuck in the box and desire to get out, I can find an out-of-the-box place—some place within me that is unencumbered by these boxes."
174 • FROM WAR TO PEACE
"And that's what you found that night with Yusuf?" Lou asked.
"Yes, and in the memories that then came of my father."
"But what about when I'm not on the trail with Yusuf?" Lou asked earnestly. "How can I find an out-of-the-box place when all hell is breaking loose around me?"
Lou wasn't trying to trip Avi up at this point. He simply knew from past experience that whatever he was learning from this likely would be swept away and forgotten at the first sign of difficulty. His lunchtime conversation with John Rencher the day before was exhibit number one of this. He wanted to find some toeholds for himself—things he could remember and latch onto when he felt the walls of the box erecting themselves around him.
"Actually," Avi answered, "since we all have out-of-the- box places within us, finding one is not difficult so long as we remember to do it. For example, you might try to identify the people toward whom you are generally and currently out of the box. Names will come to mind, and simply thinking about your experiences with those people can take you to a vantage point from where the world seems different than it did the moment before."
Lou nodded to himself. His oldest child, Mary, had just this kind of impact on Lou. She seemed to calm him simply by her presence. It had been that way between them almost since the day she was born. He used to take her on walks to clear his mind after a hard day, and they formed a bond. He read to her every night when she was young, and the soothing relationship they formed had lingered into the present. His next child, Jesse, didn't have quite the same calming influence. Lou had always driven