No matter how hard we try to avoid troubles and conflicts in life, they eventually find us. Notice how many things in our world tend to break down or wear out just because they exist. It happens in relationships too. When it comes to conflict, we can ignore it and let important relationships get sick or die, or we can find some way to promote healing by resolving or managing it. The sad thing is these troubles will continue to afflict us unless we become living peacemakers. Some people naturally have these qualities but others do not. If you don’t, you probably have to regularly deal with conflict problems that lead to stress, anxiety, and anger.
You may have heard what is claimed to be an old Cherokee proverb where a grandson goes to his grandfather not sure what to do with the anger he felt over an injustice done to him. The proverb says,
An old Cherokee told his grandson, “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.”
The boy thought about it, and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old man quietly replied, “The one you feed.”
Conflict is a natural behavior pattern that has the living qualities of something that is born, needs to be fed, and grows. Conflicts are infused with energy as you feed it and it becomes alive as a vital part of our social life or spiritual life. Conflicts have living qualities but they tend to be destructive unless managed well. A lot of contemporary advice in managing conflict helps people with knowing when and how to address conflict situations but not how to address the living aspects of it.
I suggest that a would-be peacemaker needs to have a peace system that lives and grows within him or her. The peace system gains energy by feeding on the practices of joy, peace, love, and other positive life-giving qualities. This energy enables you to naturally respond to conflict with fairness and caring. There is good literature explaining how living social systems ideas can be applied to social contexts such as conflict management and peacemaking (Jantsch, 1980). When your social and spiritual life are well fed with these positive qualities, they become a defining part of your identity, a living and active system of responding to life situations as a peacemaker. With this identity you will be a presence of fairness and caring for yourself and others in the context of conflict and chaos. This is what it means to feed the good wolf.
There is more to the story of what it means to feed and nurture your living peace system. The theory of autopoiesis, or self-producing systems (Mingers, 1995) explains what is happening when we feed, nurture, and grow our social systems. Jantsch (1980) and Fritjof (1995) describe how self-organization works in social systems based on the principle of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1987; Mingers, 1995). The primary processes of self-organization are self-maintenance, self-renewal, and self-transcendence. Just like conflicts have ways to maintain themselves, find renewal over time, and even transcend contexts, peace can also be developed to do these things and become an even stronger life force. Next time I’ll share more about how self-organization drives our impulses for peacemaking.
References
Capra, F. (1996). The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Jantsch, E. (1980). The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press.
Maturana, H., and Varela, F. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge. Boston: Shambhala.
Mingers, J. (1995). Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis. New York: Plenum Press.
Pursuing Peace 