The Answer is PLURAL
I had a conversation recently with a friend. It was one of those “catch up since lockdown” conversations. You know, the standard update on job, family, and life. It was just a conversation and yet it was so good to hear from this familiar voice.
Today this person and I have a solid friendship. It is a friendship we built from working together for several years. But when we first met that wasn’t the case. There was serious conflict when we first met. And I mean from the very first moment.
Eventually we would come to discover, it wasn’t REAL conflict. We weren’t on opposite sides of amoral or ethical issue. We hadn’t said or done something awful to a family member or friend of the other person.
We’d never crossed the unforgivable line of unfriending one another on Facebook or anything.
Actually, we didn’t know each other until we began working together. Which means we didn’t know anything about each other, NOTHING. We didn’t know enough about each other to have real conflict.
No, this conflict that kept us at very real odds for over two years was perceived, which is an adult way of saying imaginary. That’s right, we spent over two years as colleagues and adversaries, of sorts, over an imaginary conflict.
Now this would be a great time to go all social media warrior on you and offer up an obscene, and completely made-up, number two drive home my point, like…
98% of all conflicts are imaginary.
But truth is I have no idea. I don’t know how many conflicts we all deal with everyday are real and how many are imaginary.
Based on the my social media feeds though, I personally think its more than we realize.
So where do they come from and what do we do about imaginary conflicts?
I mean they’re imaginary so its safe to say we really do make them up. Of course, making things up as adults is waaaaaayyyyyyyy different from making things up as kids.
When I was a kid I would imagine being a spy, a fighter pilot, or a professional basketball player. As an adult I often imagine being talked about, misunderstood, ignored, or unappreciated.
The imagination still works but the stories change.
Also when I was a kid I never really believed I was a spy, fighter pilot, or professional basketball player. My imagination was an expression of wishfulness, wistfulness, and hopefulness.
As an adult my imagination can easily become an expression of fear, doubt, and insecurity.
Funny how things change.
Now I know why adults thought I was silly when I was a kid but, come to think of it, I’m not sure why they thought my imagination was a sign of immaturity or childishness.
Is it childish to play and dream of being a fighter pilot and then coming back to reality and do your chores? Or is it childish to treat someone as an adversary, to even work against them; all because “you think, they think, that you are a _______________”?
When I think, that they think something, and in turn act on what I think they think (that’s a lot of thinking that really isn’t even a little bit logical for those keeping score at home) I’m living a lie.
I am committing myself to a world of fear, doubt, and insecurity; a world of my own making.
I don’t know how many times I’ve done this as an adult although if I had to guesstimate I’d say way too many (it’s a nice even number).
But even if this had been the only time in my life where I chose to get caught up in imaginary conflict, it was still too costly.
And not just because of the problems it caused at work. Not because of the frustration and pain it took to work against this other person, when I did actually like them and want to work with them. It was too costly because of the price I paid spending my working hours chasing my own tail spinning imaginary tales of fear, doubt, and insecurity.
“What are they doing?”
“Are they meeting without me?”
“I bet they’re leaving me out on purpose so I will fail on this big project.”
“I should go over to the other VP’s office and start talking to him so they think I’m doing something without including them.”
I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I know I’ve got issues. But, I’m not so sure I’m the only one, not in this instance.
So I wanted to share a tool. A tool for handling disagreements, hard conversations, and even conflicts, both real and imaginary. See if you’re like me sometimes life can get to be a bit much. And, even though I don’t like admitting this (please keep it just between us), I can, from time to time, struggle to differentiate the real disagreements, difficult conversations, and conflicts from the imaginary ones.
And for that reason I need a tool. I mechanism, a device, something to jumpstart the process and help me figure out what to do next. And for that I offer the tool of Plural.
PLURAL, meaning more than one.
Sometimes the answer we need requires more one. The disagreement, hard conversation, or conflict needs more than one day, more than one attempt, more than one moment of outrage, judgment, and criticism.
I can’t tell you when it happened for my colleague and I.
I don’t remember the moment or a specific conversation that brought walls down. I just know it was right after more than one.
One day we both realized in an unspoken way that whatever we thought (see: imagined) was between us, wasn’t.
Our conflict, our immutable difference, it wasn’t real.
Maybe we just forgot what it was and then remembered we forgot it.
All I know is that it took time.
It took more than one.
It took exchanging a singular moment where maybe, just maybe there were some things we didn’t know or had misunderstood for moments, PLURAL.
PLURAL is effort.
PLURAL is scary and vulnerable.
PLURAL assumes the end isn’t near.
PLURAL is wishful, wistful, and hopeful.
PLURAL asks, “What if there was something I didn’t know?”
PLURAL wonders, “Is it possible I might have misunderstood or misinterpreted something?”
PLURAL is curious, “What is it I might be seeing that really isn’t there?”
Singular places all life’s bets on one roll of the dice.
Singular is gambling. Plural is investing.
It was great to hear from my former colleague. It was even better to hear from a friend.
PLURAL didn’t mean there weren’t difficult days.
PLURAL gave me frustrations and irritations.
There were still days of feeling misunderstood with PLURAL. I was defensive and antagonistic on several of those PLURAL days.
And it took over two years, as I recall, to sort everything out or, well, to realize there was nothing to sort. It seems we were both caught up in someone else’s conflict. We’d been baptized in the second hand waters of “I think, they think” only to one day discover neither of us believed in the message.
PLURAL isn’t the answer for every problem. It isn’t a secret sauce.
It is, I believe the only way forward for all of us.
We’re complicated people who spend some ridiculously high percentage of our time in made-up (see: imaginary) conflicts and real ones. The dangerous part though, is a lot of us are struggling to tell the difference.
We spend too many hours with the people we work with to be trapped in a nightmare about imaginary problems.
And who knows when you might need that very real friendship on the other side of that very made-up problem.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds but it does reveal which ones are real and which are imaginary.
The space in between the beginning and the end of that journey… well that’s PLURAL.
