Law Humor

Sadness, Despair, and Disagreement

By Pseudoanonymous

What a sad paragraph!

The questions we ask one another are so critically important. If you and I ask each other what we believe, we will get into talking about very heady stuff. We will put forth our beliefs and then support them with evidence and argument. All too often we will end up arguing. I know. I have done more than my share.

I understand the rhetorical trick involved, balancing this paragraph against the next:

However, when we ask one another what we truly love, what we truly value, what we care about more than anything else in life, something amazing happens. We don?t argue. We listen. We connect. We discover that we love and want the same things. We care about one another. We want honesty, depth, and intimacy in our relationships. We want enduring friendships.

Two paragraphs, setting two ideas into opposition, in this case head against heart, the sad old duality that manufactures fractured lives. Where does it come from? Where does it go?

It comes from disagreement–not disagreement itself, but that it exists where one might hope it did not, where the machinery with which to deal with it is absent or in disrepair–and it ends in despair.

Let’s learn instead how to go on in the face of disagreement, how to find the things on which we do agree, how to make an argument rather than have an argument, how to not hurt each other when we do disagree. Let’s learn instead to be, as Philip Larkin says of words spoken while lying in bed, “At once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.”

Full post as published by Arkansawyer on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).