Celebrating Our Differences; Restoring Harmony Through Love

I recently wrote a piece on how differences between us can sometimes cause divisions, but in a more positive spirit I'd like to balance that out with a different viewpoint. Specifically - that it's possible (and desirable) to put our differences aside for the sake of maintaining or restoring harmonious relationships with the people we love.

Sure many of us are aware of times during our relationships when we get stuck on the differences between us, and how that can quickly turn into some kind of conflict. Sure all of us have inflicted as much pain upon others as we have been in receipt of. And, ironically, it's often the ones we love the most that we can experience the greatest tensions with, and that can be the hardest to resolve.

Sometimes instead of love bringing us closer, our differences can begin to pull us apart. It's very easy to allow differences to overshadow the things we ordinarily admire, respect, or trust about each other. They can also affect how we react to each other.

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I've been mulling over this topic a lot lately, but it didn't take long to conclude that differences are actually a good and necessary aspect of human relationships, a strength for our species.

In fact, they're equally important as what we have in common. Our differences serve to alter existing attitudes, enhance our understanding, lends us different perspectives, gives us a little more self-awareness, leads us to self-reflection and reflection upon other things, helps us progress in more ways than we realise, takes us to new places we'd never have arrived at by ourselves. They prevent our relationships and indeed our minds and conversation from becoming stagnant, listless, or stuck-in-our-ways. They open our hearts as we empathise. In turn, they can help us reach out to others with our new understandings. They continually remind us that we're all unique, and if we can appreciate that fact of uniqueness we'll gather many friends during the course of our lives.

If we were all the same what a dull world that would be. Yet for some reason we're not very good at celebrating differences, particularly those of us from highly-competitive cultures where we're constantly (consciously or otherwise) comparing our situations to those of someone else, making differences more apparent, and often viewed negatively. Many of us are brought up in self-serving, self-interested societies, where much of what we see is not very self-aware, and hardly ever self-less.

We can all play a part in damaging our relationships whether we're the one doing the judging or the one doing the reacting, and whether we want to admit it or not! We often forget to breathe, and to be virtuous and noble and kind and to put others before ourselves, and we forget the Golden Rule to treat others how we wish to be treated. And again this applies to everyone... those who judge and those who react. We can all benefit from being a little kinder, a little gentler, a little more understanding.

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But thankfully, where there is love, there is always hope and a very good chance of resolution of conflict and harmony thereafter.

I can't think of any better option than putting love into a situation of conflict – can you?

("Hands Across the Divide" Peace Statue, Derry, Ireland - own photo)

Of course I'm not talking about romantic love here, but true love; mature, enduring, constructive, kind, sincere, transformational, unconditional, other-rather-than-self-concerned... a love that transcends the trivial and filters out everything that's not important.

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No doubt few of us can claim to have 100% harmonious relationships 100% of the time. But striving for this ideal is definitely worth the effort, because living with conflict is not only damaging to our relationships, but damaging to our health as well.

From a physical perspective, if a person is in a constant state of tension their autonomic nervous system becomes ineffective at calming the body, and thus ceases to work properly. A sustained increase in stress hormones actually suppresses the immune system, leading to all kinds of ailments, both temporary or prologned. So, for the sake of our holistic health, it's definitely in our best interests to resolve conflict situations as quickly as we can. Or at least to do our part in trying.

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Sometimes we can get very muddled with our own emotions and assume we know what the other person thinks, or what they'll say, or how they'll react, but then they can surprise us with their own spirit so full of love, that a situation resolves so quick it takes our breath away.

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Harmony in relationships comes from a position of truth - not denying the differences and clashes, but accepting and loving each other despite and sometimes because of these differences. We are who we are, and are shaped by a million things. Why not instead look upon each other with curious interest, taking time to see the world through their eyes, observing their quirks (and indeed our own quirks) with fascination, amusement, non-judgement, so that we can understand each other a little better even if we're unable to agree on every point.

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When we can celebrate our differences rather than resist them, we find ourselves enjoying harmonious relationships, eager to listen and share and be in each other's company. We move past the need to argue about things we'll never agree upon. We stop trying to change each other. We cease needing to defend or justify our positions, or demand justifications from the other, because we can simply live and let live.

Love, then, is the salve for all wounds.

Love connects us when differences threaten to divide.

Love brings us together.