Fulfillment, Conflict and In-Laws

An ongoing conflict in my house has always been where we are spending the Thanksgiving Holiday. Traditionally my mother-in-law flies down from Seattle and my sister-in-law, a skilled cook, (cooking for lots of other people is something I myself find terrifying - I might poison them all, but that is another entry,) my sister-in-law cooks a family meal. My parents who live in Arizona, like to spend the holiday in Las Vegas, watching shows, gambling, and eating at a buffet prepared by someone else.

Did I mention this conflict is silly? It's silly. Every year I angst over where my husband, daughter and I should go. It becomes a family battle field. All sorts of moral issues come into play: issues about family loyalty; the Joy or lack of joy of the holidays; and past dramas from my childhood. All this "stuff" rears its heretofore hidden head - stuff like when I was growing up my mother always went to her sister-in-law's house against her will, and on and on blah, blah, blah.

The holiday becomes a fight. Until the day I decided to stop making the conflict a battle front. I wish I could tell you it involved a complicated and extreme shift in every one's perceptions of the issue. Fortunately that isn't the case. The end of the Thanksgiving struggle happened in about 3 seconds this year, (the fight usually starts around September,) and it happened inside me. I woke up and decided not to make it a battle field any more. The conflict went away - just like that - with that small shift in my own perception. Any internal churning just melted, for real, quickly, easily. It occurs to me my family's Thanksgiving conflict has always been internal; it takes place inside me even though it involves lots of other people.

All conflicts are silly that way. The trick is to stop inventing battle fields and then refusing to budge. It's a big relief to let conflict go. I know, (I'm Italian, afterall,) there's a certain appeal to getting loud and passionate about stuff - the common word for it is "drama." I teach drama; drama can be fun and it turns on conflict. But it's just pretend. There's not much point in spinning in it after the curtain closes.

Walking away from conflict may feel like an impossibility when you are embroiled in the depths of it - but conflict is always self-generated. The external violence, be it physical or psychological, is always a manifestation of that internal toil. Getting over it, out of the self generated drama, means releasing the internal struggle. Over any issue. Any time.

Then, from any given moment we can return to the larger goal, the only goal, aligning ourselves with what is real, surrendering our self-made "battle fields" to that.

Today I remind myself to surrender to my inner awareness of Truth. I turn from drama to fulfillment.