Are there some family members you don’t speak to anymore? Former friends you no longer hang around with? Colleagues at work who do their best to make themselves unpleasant? Unfortunately, disputes seem to be an inevitable part of life, but they don’t have to go on forever.
If the other person hasn’t come forward to make amends, maybe it’s time for you to take some action. Now, this certainly may not be at all easy or pleasant for you.
In fact, it will almost certainly bring about a very distasteful feeling on your part to have to make the conciliatory approach. But in the long run it’s almost certainly going to be well worth the effort.
I’m assuming, of course (as you undoubtedly are too), that the disagreement was entirely the other person’s fault, not yours. It’s also their fault that they haven’t apologized by now as they certainly should have.
What seems to be needed is a strong, wise person willing to come forward and take the lead in solving things. That strong, wise person sounds like you.
You don’t have to apologize, however, in the abject way that the other person ought to have done. You just need to come forward in a friendly way to try to renew things. Let them know you miss the relationship you had, and would like to restore it.
Look at the way most problems in life are caused and solved. A tiny bacterium or virus causes an illness, and a pill, hypodermic syringe, or even a hospital is needed to cure it. A toddler messes up the house, and an adult has to work to make it spic-and-span again. Over time, raindrops can ruin a street, but then a giant road grader comes along to smoothly restore things.
What do all these situations seem to have in common?
As you can see, problems always tend to be solved by something quite a bit bigger than whatever caused them. So if you decide to be a problem solver, doesn’t that make you a lot bigger than the problem causer?
Now would be a great time to think about being the big one in the picture – the hospital, not the germ; the adult, not the toddler; the road grader, not the rain.
Taking the lead in trying to put a peaceful end to a dispute between you and someone else definitely makes you the bigger one. But one thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to tell them that.
After they get a little more common sense back, they’ll eventually come to realize it.
Little things often cause problems but then,
Something larger makes matters better again.
In a dispute, this fact should act as a trigger
to make YOU the one who decides to be bigger.
