accepting conflict

My current assignment is learning to be emotionally honest.
As with any assignment it requires research, elimination, testing of theories and objective experimentation.
It seems my assignments always end up being about overcoming addiction.

I'm addicted to so many of my ideas about myself (that are created by how I think others see me) that I find it physically painful to challenge them.
Michael J has helped me with his advice in The Man in The Mirror.
And Six Feet Under showed me how to accept that conflict is an everyday natural occurrence that I don’t need to fear and remove myself from.

Our current obsession is with conflict – the wars, politics, greed, the lack of support for suffering. But these things have been going on for so long that, like antibiotics, people are becoming immune. They have built up a dangerously high tolerance to them.
Who, in our world today, is showing us how to deal with conflict in a healthy enriching way?
All we see are the old ways that don’t work anymore.

One of my colleagues is an inspiration to me.
He deals with conflict head on. Without anger or an agenda, he is literally saying, “Alrighty, lets put all the cards on the table and see if we can make a good hand.” I see him objectively sorting chaff from hay. It’s never about him – it’s about the conflict. And to him, every conflict is manageable - it is merely another box to tick off for the day...

Oh for such objectivity...