Arbitration & Mediation

Honoring Richard By Carrying on His Work

By Victoria Pynchon

Unlike many others in the mediation field, I did not make the acquaintance of Richard Millen until recently.  In the past couple of years, we met for extended lunches and too many tall lattes (the lattes mine) between the old Wolfgang Puck's and the shuttered Virgin Record Store at Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Heights. 

Aside from the usual frustrations of mediators (insufficient respect; the difficulty of making a living; doctrinal disputes; and, the like) Richard suffered from age bias quite acutely.  It was not  any physical ailment or  diminishment in mental capacity that left Richard unoccupied after a robust and active professional life, it was the way in which he felt patronized, under-utilized and overlooked because others believed he was simply too old to do the job.

This is as untrue as any other stereotype or prejudice. As Richard noted in Transcendent Mediation, the facilitation of dispute resolution is a wisdom business in which the mediator, as the agent of change, disappears as the parties "do for themselves what they came for the mediator to do."  Richard explained:

Wise mediators . . . need to adopt is a different epistemology which changes the way we think about the conflict[,] thereby avoid[ing] 'solutions that may seem quick and easy and expedient, but in fact are premature. . .resulting in a helping and a fixing instead of a non-hierarchical, common endeavor toward, if not to, a complete change of energy and reconciliation. 

'Our essential task is to allow all sides of an issue or pairs of opposites to exist in equal dignity and worth until their hidden unity is revealed.  By befriending and strengthening our capacity to hold paradox, we explore the realm of spiritual growth.  As we actualize all aspects of ourselves and weave them into an apparent symmetry, we become more skillful problem solvers, mediators, stewards of justice, and models of patience and mercy.   

Finally, there is [the instruction of] The Bhagavad Gita [that] we should neither be attached to the actor nor to the fruits of the action.  [W]hen a mediator is not so attached, the mediator is truly liberated to serve the parties in the mediation process by changing it to a positively oriented non-hierarchical, common endeavor in which the parties do for themselves what they came for the mediator to do.   

 

  

That is how to be and do as both a mediator and as a person in one's life with []power[] of choice.  When as mediators we are in service to others, we are working on ourselves.  When we are personally working on ourselves, we are helping others.  It is the same.  We cannot tell the difference.  

 

It is as Rumi wrote,

I, you, he, she, we,

I, you, he, she, we.

In the garden of mystic lovers,

these are not true distinctions.

We've taken on racial and gender bias here recently.  In honor of Richard, let's also rethink our attitudes toward the aged or "elderly."  As geriatric nurse Alison Parsons explains in her article Attitudes to the elderly:

Ageism is "a process of systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are old... Ageism allows the younger generations to see older people as different from themselves, thus they subtly cease to identify with their elders as human beings." (Butler, 1975, cited in Matteson & McConnell, 1988: 482). Matteson and McConnell (1988: 482) point out that ageism decreases social status, and diminishes contact with younger people. It affects the health care of older people by influencing the attitudes of health care professionals and policy-makers towards the aggressiveness of diagnosis and treatment of the elderly. These attitudes are often based on erroneous assumptions regarding the utility of chronological age as a marker of function or ability to contribute to society. The tragedy of ageism is that it robs society of the fullest contributions of its older members, and it denies people's fulfilment of their potential as human beings throughout the life course.

 

Let's use the time of Richard's passing to take a look again at his writings and rethink our own attitudes not only toward age but toward what too many attorney-mediators dismiss as "touchy feely" practices - the ones that can take the opportunity offered by conflict to experience a moment of clarity, transformation and transcendence.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on March 11, 2010 (boomark / email).