A Safe Space | Peaceful Relationships
I’m writing this article in early February on an international trip to Greece. I’m back in my AirBnb after spending the past 5 hours with one of my global worker friends. Get this – he is a white American who married a woman from Japan, and they are now working in a European culture with Muslim refugees who fled the Middle East several years ago…and I thought the U.S. was the melting pot! Talk about a convergence of nationalities, cultures, and worldviews. This week, I am thankful again for the gift of travel. It is a practice I need to continue to broaden my view of the world and provide a regulated dose of humility about the truth of how small I am and how so much of the world does not live or think like me.
Similarly, but changing the subject, I’m also thinking about our slow but continued collective journey of healing over the past few years. There is still so much grief from our past, uncertainty of our future, as well as our existing levels of anxiety and fear, that are the air we continue to breathe in the present. And on top of all of that, 2024 tees off an election year (sigh). Now I bring that up not because I’m very political (which I’m not), but because I’m aware that fear, anxiety, and the resulting cultural polarization are already marketed, weaponized, and therefore pumping through the veins of our news, our social media feeds, our communities, and therefore our souls. And unfortunately, it’s only going to ratchet up because the stakes feel even higher.
I appreciate so many of you responding in recent years by reading about and reflecting on how to navigate professionally in our polarized culture…I see the book titles on your desks. This week overseas reminds me of the need for us, firstly, to be aware and continue the inner work of attending to our biases. There is a hard but needed gift that comes through the humility of acknowledging our own ideologies, culture, race, nationality, life experience, etc., and how those are not assumed and shared by others. Below is a sample of a very good list of biases I came across in the past couple of years (plus, the author made them all start with the letter C, which is fun). These continue to foster for me a needed humility in our anxious, polarized culture.
- Confirmation bias: the human brain welcomes information that confirms what it already thinks and resists information that disturbs or contradicts what it already thinks.
- Complexity bias: the human brain prefers a simple lie to a complex truth.
- Community bias: it is very hard to see something your group doesn’t want you to see. This is a form of social confirmation bias.
- Complementary bias: if people are nice to you, you’ll be open to what they see and have to say. If they aren’t nice to you, you won’t.
- Contact bias: if you lack contact with someone, you won’t see what they see.
The next three suggestions come from a recent email subscription I joined. It is a collaboration of Adam Grant (I’m such a fan of his) and others that invites us to engage the social and political polarization of our American culture (again, very timely in an election year). They acknowledge the need for a grassroots movement in a society where most of our institutions—politics, government, media, financial, religious, etc.—are now largely suspect. And again, each one of these start with a C:
- Curiosity – a humble learning that chooses an intellectual openness (versus a defensiveness) to learn from others that think differently than you.
- Compassion – getting outside of yourself emotionally to empathize with others and their lived experiences.
- Courage – having the resolve to stay with it and trust that the diverse mosaic of humanity is necessary, needed, and good for our future. All things that are truly good and worth it are not easy.
What are your practices that foster non-anxiety inwardly as well as peace in relationships in our culture outwardly?
May you be well, and may you do good.
Your cheerleader and chaplain,
Adam Gray
Blog written by Adam Gray, AC Chaplain
