Conflict

I believe that conflict will always be a part of our life. As I talk to people older than me, I’ve noticed that they’ve all endured seasons that seem unbearable: a broken marriage, a life threatening car accident or sickness, sudden death in a place where there was life. This is alarming to me because my life has been easy, it seems, and conflict surely awaits me.

I believe that we can to a degree choose the type of conflict we will face. Conflict is reactive or proactive. Either something happens to us, or we try to make something happen. Either we do all we can to protect ourselves from it only to get struck by an eighteen wheeler on our way to the store, or we decide to become a great artist and fail and fail for years and develop a wretched smoking habit from depression. I secretly believe that if we avoid conflict, it will find us, but if we seek it out, we can at least face it on our own terms. I don’t know that this is true. But it is what I’ve done with IES.

We think the worst case scenario is that we embrace conflict, try to become the great artist, and get hit by the eighteen wheeler anyways. And that’s entirely possible, but it’s not the worst case scenario. Why not embrace what’s inevitable and jump into it, face it on my our own terms, and, hopefully, at worst, when the broken marriage, car accident or sickness comes our way, maybe we’ll be better prepared. Is it fear of or facing reality? I don’t know. I just think experiencing conflict gives us a better understanding of what life is about, and it’s one of the only ways we can know what really matters.