Ruby is friendly with a ready smile and an effervescent personality. Although she has only lived in her neighbourhood for a few months, she knows many people, at least by sight, and greets them with a cheery ‘hello’ or a grin when she passes them on the street.
Yet there is a woman living round the corner who always avoids eye contact or looks through Ruby as though she doesn’t exist, despite her approachable smile. The first few times this happened, Ruby didn’t think about it much. After a while though, she became very irritated by it.
“Who does she think she is?” she complained to her partner one evening. “Swanning around like she’s too good to give anyone else the time of day. Stuck up cow.”
Over a period of a few weeks, Ruby found herself getting more and more wound up about this woman. She saw her almost every day: on the school run (her kids went to the same school as Ruby’s), at the nearby local shops, or on her way back from the station. She wore clothes in a similar style to Ruby’s and was around the same age. They seemed to have a lot in common and, under normal circumstances, Ruby was sure they would be friends – she actually wondered whether this was what irked her more than anything else. Whatever it was, she was aware that her irritation was quite irrational and she couldn’t admit her feelings to anyone other than her long-suffering partner.
Every time Ruby passed the woman, she noticed how much of her head space was occupied by the thoughts and stories she was inventing about her, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She knew she was overreacting, but couldn’t control her irritation.
Ruby was at War, without ever having exchanged a word with her ‘enemy’.
One day, whilst walking her kids to school with a friend, they passed the ‘stuck up cow’ and Ruby was amazed to see her beam at one of her friend’s kids and talk animatedly to him. When she was out of earshot, as casually as she could, Ruby commented to her friend about it.
“Yeah she’s a funny one that Julie isn’t she?” said her friend, “She’s absolutely brilliant with kids and works in the nursery my Daniel went to. All the kids love her and she loves them but she’s cripplingly shy with adults and finds social interaction really hard. She’s worked on it quite a lot but still has big issues with people she doesn’t know, poor thing.”
In that moment, Ruby sensed a huge shift in her feelings towards Julie. She felt embarrassed and a little bit ashamed for having held so much anger towards someone she didn’t even know. She felt lighter, too, having been freed from the chains of the stories and judgments that she had forged in her own mind around her neighbour, and it shifted out of her warring state.
Afterwards, whenever she saw Julie, she continued to smile in her direction but no longer read anything into her lack of response. She could even laugh with her partner about how transactional her approach to smiling had been!
Nothing had changed, yet everything had.
In the War to Peace workshops, we talk a lot about how our own internal state of being at War or at Peace governs our interactions much more than other people’s words or actions, and how we can often change a huge problem by changing our mind about it. Nothing changes, yet everything does.
Over to you
Where are you weighing yourself down with chains of assumption?
Do you know someone who could benefit from War to Peace?
If you, or someone you know, would love to spend more time at Peace in 2015, our next open-access War to Peace workshop is on 20th March and we have just THREE spaces left! Please note, we will not be running another public workshop until at least October, so if you want to attend sooner rather than later, do book your space here or please feel free to pass on this link to a friend, colleague or family member.
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