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It happened last night. After coming inside, I had left a few small piles of snow on the floor. A half hour later, Rebecca stepped in one.

“Oh,” she said. “Melted snow.”

Standing next to her, I said, “Don’t you mean ‘water’?”

We laughed. Which was it? Water, or melted snow?

At first, it seems like a silly question. But a moment’s reflection will show you that the ‘water or melted snow’ question is what all our problems revolve around!

Imagine, for a moment, that Rebecca and I had gotten into a terrible fight over the issue–

“It’s water!”

“No! It’s melted snow!”

“Water!”

“Melted snow!”

You see, we could say that there is a ‘reality’ expressed in the wetness on the floor. But it’s easy for us humans to ignore the reality, and to get all worked up about proving our own viewpoint of the situation. Arguing about water or melted snow might be ridiculous – it’s just two words we attach to the same phenomenon. But then we attach other things to those words! For instance, if it’s ‘water’, it’s no big deal, because the water will simply evaporate in a little bit and be gone. But if it’s ‘melted snow’, then we can talk about my thoughtless actions of tracking snow into the house.

And there the glistening wetness lies, very quietly, doing nothing much at all.

In the same way, here is some land, and along come the humans and draw an imaginary line in it. Now we can have the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and shoot bombs at each other, because we take that line for ‘real’. In the same way, we can get really upset with our spouse because of imaginary lines like ‘money’ and ‘respect’ and ‘putting equal effort into the relationship’. We can even get frustrated at ourselves for failing to adhere to our own symbol-creations, such as ‘expected behaviors’, ‘emotional control’, or ‘getting our work done on time’!

Any human argument, stress, or anxiety, if we look carefully enough, revolves around the issue of ‘water or melted snow?’.

The answer isn’t to sit down and compromise until we can decide on one or the other. (ie. It’s actually melted snow.) This just leaves one side feeling like they’ve been stepped on.

The answer isn’t to help each person see the other person’s side of the issue. (ie. It’s actually either/or – there’s no reason to fight about it.) This only breeds a state of tolerance, where we accept the other person but don’t really feel good about it.

The answer just might be to see what is ‘actually there’, and in doing so, we’d find that further conflict was impossible. It’s not about compromise or about negotiation – it’s about transforming ourselves so that the root of the problem disappears. And the root of the problem? That we’re taking our symbols for realities. Realities worth stressing over, fighting over, and even killing over. Isn’t this incentive enough to stop for a moment and see what we’re doing?

We’ve been trying the method of negotiation and fighting for as long as history records. The result? A continued state of negotiation and fighting.

On a personal level, we’ve also been using these methods our entire lives. And the result? Lives that hold just as much stress and frustration as happiness.

This isn’t about belittling our problems by comparing them to something as seemingly unimportant as water vs. melted snow. It’s about seeing that the root of our problems doesn’t lie within the problems themselves.

There is another way. Isn’t it time we gave it a try?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Quick Thoughts. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.