The Real Thing

It's not Coke or Pepsi

My love affair with John O’Donohue continues and his book Anam Cara is HIGHLY recommended for those of you ready for more depth. It’s the real thing.

O’Donohue succinctly explains why we’ve largely lost our ability to dialogue with others who disagree with us. He talks about the value of contradiction as “the complex force of growth that disavows mere linear progress in order to awaken all the aggregate energies of an experience.” That’s a poetic way of describing how addiction to superficial agreement short circuits individual fulfillment and harmonic relationships.

He continues: “What we call the negative is usually the surface form of contradiction. If we maintain our misery at this surface level, we hold off the initially threatening but ultimately redemptive and healing transfiguration that comes through engaging our inner contradiction…. Our lives would be immeasurably enriched if we could bring the same hospitality in meeting the negative as we bring to the joyful and pleasurable. In avoiding the negative, we only encourage it to recur. The negative is one of the closest friends of your destiny. It contains essential energies that you need and that you cannot find elsewhere… Every person has certain qualities or presences in their heart that are awkward, disturbing, and negative. One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness toward them. In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities.”

Finally, “Frequently, you see people who are sorely divided. They are in a permanent war zone and have never managed to go deeper to the hearth of kinship, where the two forces are not enemies but reveal themselves as different sides of the one belonging.”

This explains why what used to be friendly disagreement has morphed into shunning. The fear of contradiction, the demonization of the negative, has fueled a frantic obsession with superficial compliance, so much so that many otherwise intelligent people simply can’t continue to be friendly with those who see things differently than they do.

This psychological aberration became virulent during Covid. Anyone who questioned blind obedience to a globally orchestrated “safe and effective” narrative was ostracized. It wasn’t OK to question authority. Ironically, the most vociferous in their defense of “settled science” (an oxymoron) were old hippies, the very same who fought against authority during the madness of Vietnam.

What happened to turn rebels into sheep?

That question could spawn volumes! But I prefer to return to O’Donohue’s Celtic wisdom and join him in championing the value of negativity and contradiction. Can we, can I, learn how to enjoy the conflict of ideas and opinions and beliefs, seeking to learn rather than resolve? What can I learn, from those who think differently than I do? And how can I grow by accepting the negative aspects of myself without a judgement/change agenda. This is me! This is you! Can we sing in harmony rather than demand one of us conform to the other so we’re in unison? How boring marching in lockstep would be!

As Walt Whitman celebrated: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

May we welcome all that we are and be curious in the face of all that others bring, especially when they seem profoundly different than we are. What might we learn together when we surrender the demand for quick agreements on superficial levels?