I’m so excited about my new project! I’ve just begun to interview editors and literary agents about their experience with co-authors, the perils and pleasures of co-authoring. Having suffered and celebrated co-authoring myself, I’d be interested in interviewing any readers of this blog who are or have been co-authors. I’ll respect your privacy and your anonymity. I want to offer tried and true ways to help potential co-authors have a truly satisfying and rewarding experience!

Often, what gets me into trouble is thinking. I depend on my ability to think. I make my living thinking, and I write to think (as many extroverts do when no one else is around). But thinking can be a liability as well as a gift. If we are too dependent on thinking, our selves are big heads and atrophied bodies and spirits. So my tools for today have to do with my body and spirit.

The first tool is a mantra. Mantras are words (Peace), sounds (Ohmmmmm), or phrases that, when repeated over and over, have the effect of focusing our busy minds away from thinking. A mantra provides a no thinking zone for overthinkers like me. My mantra is a rather long one, but one you’ve probably heard before: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. This is the serenity prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous and the prayer of many overthinkers. When I say this mantra/prayer over and over, I internalize three words, accept, courage, and change. I don’t necessarily think about these words, but together they change the feelings in my body somehow. I am calmer, less caught up in my own thinking, and better able to focus on what will move me to a happier, more productive place.

The second tool is related to the first. It is meditation. Mediation requires sitting or lying down in a place that is quiet, closing your eyes and concentrating on one thing. There is walking meditation, of course, and this requires a soft eye focus (you don’t want to get run over by an approaching bus), and concentration on the rhythm of your steps. Some meditation practices depend on a mantra. Some ask simply that the meditater observe her breathing and let all thoughts go by without attaching to them. This, of course, is easier said than done. When I meditate, if I can let even one thought go by, it is a small victory. I have even used a meditation teacher. She was gentle and persistent with me. The results of my meditating were instantly recognizable. I had less fear in me and about everything outside of me. I meditated for months, and then I stopped. Why, you might ask? I feel sheepish telling you that it was because I didn’t have enough time. But I have time to worry, you might say. Yes, and I am determined to reinstitute my meditation practice if only for five minutes a day. Ask me about this and hold me to it, please.

The last tool is making art. This can be knitting, cabinet making, scrapbooking, gardening, or painting. You don’t have to be an artist, you just have to love doing whatever it is you love doing with your hands, and you have to love it enough to get lost in it. So what if you won’t be asked to hang the finished product in the Metropolitan. So what if you drop a stitch and your scarf looks more like a cobweb made by a drunken spider than an article of fashion. If I can get lost in the rhythm of the insertion of knitting needles into the growing mass of my creation, if I can feel the softness of the shawl emerging in my lap, if I can look into the depth of the colors I’ve chosen, I stop thinking for a blessed while and my body and spirit grow to equal the size of my overused mind. I am integrated, peaceful, and refreshed.

I don’t know where I got the idea that if I try hard enough, I can always make a situation better.  This wasn’t something either of my parents emphasized as a positive behavior, nor do I think I learned it in school or my communities.  Perhaps it is a woman thing.  Yet I know many women who don’t have this obsession - and it sometimes feels like an obsession.

What does this look like in real time?  I’ll get cross-wise with someone- my husband, my step-children, a colleague, and the minor disagreement turns into a major feud.  I keep thinking about it, trying to figure out, first, where I went wrong in my communication, then what I could do to make it better.  My thinking usually goes something like this, “If I could only explain what I think the problem is in such a way that the other person would understand (not agree but understand), then we would be able to begin to break up the log-jam of our feud.  So I circle back, call the person or arrange to see them and do my best to describe what I think has locked us in combat.  Sometimes this works.

More often, though, I just make whatever it is worse.  The other person is tired of hearing what I think, or doesn’t care.  I know I’m assuming their motivation as I write this, so let me say that this is what the other person’s reaction looks and sounds like to me.  Some people would rather stay mad than resolve or explore a disagreement.  Some need time to process their own thoughts and feelings and my bombardment of thoughts just adds more information they may not want or need. 

This morning, after trying to resolve a current disagreement of some months’ standing with a colleague, I asked myself why I felt compelled to do all of the resolving?  It seemed almost comical to me, the image of my entering and reentering the ring of conflict without invitation or interest on the part of my colleague.  Who asked me to be the one to do this?

I believe that I ask myself because the existence of ongoing conflict is so painful for me, and I feel so burdened by my really awful history in resolving it with others, that I want to prove I can make it (whatever it is) better now after studying and writing about conflict for years.

Sometimes I can’t do this.  It takes two, or three, or a community, or a country or a continent to want to come together in honest exploration of an issue.  If I see myself as Palestine or Israel I can keep trying to reopen the exploration, and I may keep getting rejected or bombed, or relocated.  I know this is a simplistic comparison.  I also know that if I’m hurt enough, or angry enough, I may decide, or the other person may decide that conversation isn’t worth it.  I’ve described such a situation above.  Do you have ways that have worked for you to manage your own feelings in conflict?  What actions seem to have worked for you when in the middle of conflict with another?

My personal experience with conflict has been long and rough.  My scholarly interest and research (which is sourced in and fueled by this personal experience) has focused on ways to transform conflict into collaboration, as I passionately wish to do most of the time.  But we cannot do this alone.  Partners and colleagues must want our relationships more than they want to be right. 

Wanting a relationship that has been hurtful and damaging is hard.  Sometimes we have to let go in order to see how hard we were hanging on to righteousness, or to see the other’s perspective clearly.  Walking away from a marriage, a profitable business, a coaching relationship, or a friendship feels like failure.  It also feels like giving up on wonderful possibilities (greater profit, renewed love, effective collaboration) just because we are unhappy in the moment.  Why can’t we make things right between two people who know about conflict, and know about love?

In my own desperation to try to understand another’s hurtfulness, a friend asked “What makes you think you are not as important as anyone else in this conflict?”  My “not important” comes from trying to twist myself around the other’s assurance that they are right.   The resulting mental muddle only makes me less sure of what to do in the conflict.

I am reading a novel about a white man who lived among Indians in the early part of the 18th century somewhere in the southern U.S.  It wasn’t a pretty time in our history with Indians nor was it a happy time in the life of the protagonist.  He repeatedly loses the woman he loves to another man, the changing times, or his own neglect.  Yet, he is a good man, perhaps a great one.  I thought to myself as I was reading today that none of us gets through this life without some disregard for others, and without conflict.

In a recent conversation with my 87 year old mother, she mused that she didn’t understand why people left marriages just because of infidelity.  I immediately realized that it took me two husbands to understand that there wasn’t a perfect one waiting somewhere for me.  I said to her, “If you believe that there is a perfect person, then you would not put up with or accept the obvious imperfection of infidelity.  If you believe that we all have good and bad whirled together to make us unique beings, you might be inclined to value the relationship more than being right and stay to see if you could work it out.”  Some of us hold onto the possibility of perfection, our own or other’s, for long years into our adulthood.  Then we cannot forgive another for not being perfect.

That forgiveness and acceptance takes two.  Two countries, groups, or people.  One can’t do it.  One can’t kiss and make up, or bury the hatchet.  Both have to give up needing to be right at the expense of the other.  Both have to value the relationship above past hurts.  Only then is collaboration possible.