The Natural Lifespan of Conflict
Grudges are sneaky mortal. They’d prefer we didn’t realize that they aren’t designed to live forever. They draw deceptive power from the difficulty we experience in creating an exhaustive list of what someone must do for you to hold bad sentiment towards them indefinitely. Of course there can be no widespread agreement in this. How could we with any confidence enclose the places in which these actions live? The nature of subjectivity does not allow it. Among us are some that would forgive murder and others that hold steady to things that seem small. So many have perpetrated and been forgiven for examples that I want to put forth, erasing the possibility of a comprehensive case. There are things I’ve done myself that I am sure would spell life sentences in front of someone else’s judge and jury. My guess is that most of us have living and breathing examples of this type within our lives. The sheer amount of different perceptions of right and wrong proves to us emphatically that it cannot be done. We can only work to acknowledge and respect when a grudge approaches old age. These signs of old age always present themselves. In infancy, a grudge carries a heat the type that gets felt in the heel of the hand; that begs to be kneaded out with the thumb of the other. In this stage there is no color besides red and its derivatives. Actions outside of the normal range are adopted into the imagination so seamlessly. We fantasize about restitutive acts of violence and manipulation. We believe the most we ever do in Newton’s third law. Oh the things we pretend to be capable of doing to one another! And it feels good to be this way, to project an equalizing action based on the weight of wrong that we feel. But this can’t last forever; we don’t have enough in the mental battery to sustain the heat nor the intensity. So the grudge becomes muted as it matures. Fire doesn’t bear the same strength after long hours of burning against itself as it does in the moments near ignition. The muted grudge affords us capabilities of suppression. We find ourselves hugging our perpetrators. Or shaking their hands. Or working in the same spaces as them, sometimes towards similar goals. We do not recognize the fire that once was, nor can we call it back to life. The grudge lives in constant fear of this stage and rightfully so. This muting constitutes the beginning of a descent into the excretory system of the emotional state. Digestion has commenced, and if left to its natural progression, the grudge faces an expulsion from the psyche. The commencement of this digestion is contingent at least in part upon the erosion of sight as a trigger to the recall of the sentiments associated with the grudge. To find ourselves in a place where we can survive handshakes, hugs, and the sharing of space we must occupy a state in which the sight of our perpetrator does not reignite the flame of conflict. The link between image and imagination must find itself fractured by time, circumstance, or compartmentalization. Only then can digestion begin. Grudges however are both self-conscious and conscious of the ramifications of the loss of sight as a trigger. Because they possess an innate desire to exist, they will work within the entire spread of their power to extend their life. This is why in some cases we cannot envision a world in which we have released the tensions associated with certain conflicts. Grudges are constantly working for their self-preservation and that work is what produces in us reactive and false feelings of their permanence. When a grudge becomes aware that sight has been lost as a trigger, it takes steps to reestablish it as one, in a sense looking to reactivate it. It locates vulnerable moments and seeks to release negative sentiment in those moments with the hope to reverse the process of digestion, creating an emotional upchuck of sorts. The grudge waits patiently while we go about our daily lives, anticipating the moments in which it can be most effective in this re-ignition. Grudges await with eagerness the time we spend on social media as it holds the largest potential to facilitate their success. They monitor as we scroll, and when they see us land on content either posted by our perpetrator our associated with them, they shoot concentrated negative sentiment into our psyche with hopes to reassert sight as a trigger to the conflict. If they are able to exert upon us a force that pushes us to click on a page, they have achieved a success. For the grudge, the time we spend on the page of our perpetrator or someone associated with them is synonymous to when Mario gets the star. It is one of the moments that the grudge awaits patiently and strategically because an unprecedented power over the psyche is wielded and the channels through which negative sentiment is delivered are dilated until we return to our feeds or exit the application altogether. Sometimes the grudge exerts so much power in these moments that it causes us in the future to visit the page of our perpetrator just for the purpose of feeling the distant heat of the fire as it begs for renewal. We wallow in it the same way we do stories about the tumultuous lives of people we may or may not know. Instability and conflict are incredibly exciting. If you’re working on forgiveness; on the expulsion of a grudge from an influential place in the psyche, provide support to the digestion process. Mute your perpetrator on social media. Facilitate the removal of sight as a trigger. Take steps to undercut the grudge’s self-interested work. It is nothing but a parasite as any other, reliant on the confusion, misplaced attention, and willingness of the host to be reinfected on the cusp of being cured. It will not live forever if you do not allow it to.
