The majority of us avoid confrontation.
We see or sense potential conflicts and do our best to either defuse or sidestep the issues.
We will even avoid certain people and forums we know have a propensity to be contentious, so long as there is not a direct impact on our lives.
A degree of the avoidance is healthy (you probably don’t need to react to the person who accidentally bumped into you in line), but complete avoidance is a danger to you and greater society. Certain issues, actions, and attitudes must be addressed. Failure to do so reinforces the behaviors that could result in far more hazardous consequences in future iterations for you and others. We may attempt to search for reasons we shouldn’t confront something uncomfortable, but in the end we recognize our excuses are manufactured.
The truth, we know, needs to be brought into the light.
“Your flip and callous arrogance in these things bothers me. You pass it off as a small thing, but it’s anything but that. Yeast, too, is a “small thing” but it works its way through a whole batch of bread dough pretty fast.”
The truth, as Paul points out, is that in choosing not to engage on these topics, we allow them to fester. His analogy of yeast to dough should be cause for alarm. It should make us diligently pour over our lives to assess what ‘small things’ we have overlooked. For we too are impacted when we allow things to slide and thereby tacitly endorse a new line of acceptable behavior.
What once ‘small thing’ have you failed to address? It is not too late, and these things don’t get better on their own. They require direct engagement and difficult conversations, but the reward is more than worth the investment. Embrace this truth and experience the peace it brings today (for it is unlikely to get any easier).