There is a difference between keeping peace (peacekeeping) and making peace (peacemaking). Peacekeeping takes a lot of work and saps energy. It’s never-ending. Peacemaking lays groundwork for authentic peace to rule. Peacekeepers work hard to keep the tensions from rising. They often pretend nothing is wrong. Peacemakers allow tensions to be aired and might even precipitate necessary conflict. Peacekeepers avoid conflict at all costs. Their reward is the semblance of tranquility, and the slow demise of their integrity.

Peacemakers invite necessary conflict. They know there is no other pathway to greater understanding between warring people. Peacekeepers may endure fake peace for decades – and feel “called” or anointed or special.

Peacekeepers often have high levels of martyrdom. How else would they rationalize the stress of trying to hide the proverbial elephant in the room? Peacekeepers are often portrayed as deeply spiritual because they can endure so much without “saying anything.” They often see their suffering as persecution, rather than the product of being misguided.

Peacemakers value authentic peace. The peace that exists between people with the courage to endure conflict, for the sake of lasting peace, is as gold when compared with its counterfeit cousin.

Assume your legitimate role as a peacemaker, and give up the other as nonsense.

Former Durban resident and Glenwood High School Old Boy and East Coast Radio coach Stephen Light is in KZN this week, visiting from the UK. We go back a few years. He was about 13, delivering a prepared speech in my classroom and alluded to eating polony in Smith’s t-room he visited in Red Hill as a very young boy. Light, always a very bright light, quickly made the connection once it was clear his English teacher knew the same shop and was also a Mr. Smith.

Stephen Light is an executive coach with a remarkable list of international clients.

“I challenge people. I go beyond the obvious, showing them what they don’t see, helping them change themselves,” writes Stephen. Light is also an accomplished actor. He brought Charles Dickens’ Artful Dodger to delightful life in Oliver on the Glenwood stage co-starring with Durban’s Steven Stead who played the perfect Oliver.

“Consider yourself at home,” Stephen, “part of the furniture,” while visiting Durban. Perhaps you could pop in to your former high school, show those boys the sky really is the limit. After all, you’ve proved it. Your life demonstrates there are no limits to what a person may achieve if he or she merges courage, integrity, humor, commitment and daring vision.

May the Five Gs live and grow within each of us and our families.

• Gratitude: the capacity to express thankfulness, not as a trick but as sincere appreciation for life and all of the joys and challenges life offers. 
• Generosity: the ability to give and share more than from excess. Generosity is not giving others what you don’t need, it is giving from what you do need. 
• Grace: offering kindness, acceptance, a welcome to others when and where it is undeserved. Remember, it is not about who others are, grace is about who you are. 
• Goodness: seeking the highest good for self and others. It is not selfish to seek your own highest good. Seeking your own highest good is the starting block that makes it possible to be a presence of goodness for others. 
• Genuineness: living with sincerity and interest in others. Genuineness cannot be faked although many try.   

None of the above will be ours through determination, resolutions or reading some guru or watching another YouTube presentation. It is the byproduct of humility, willingness to listen to others, a desire to learn from our mistakes, and a desire to make good (as far as is possible) on past failings, and then the courage to act on what we know to be good, right, and wholesome.

Listen closely when people talk to you. 

Most people are aching to tell you who they are. 

They will leave trails, sometimes crumbs for you to follow, and the trails and crumbs will lead you into the deepest, most beautiful and sometimes troubled recesses of their lives. 

But, go ahead and follow the leads. 

I assure you that you will end up in a beautiful place. 

You may have to turn a blind eye to some wrecks along the way, hold your nose in some of the crevices. 

If you persist and hold onto the thought that indeed you are no better than any other human and follow without judgment you will end up in a place more beautiful than the finest artwork the world has to offer. Yes, it is more beautiful because the “Art” to whom you are listening is still in creation, in motion, yet unwrapping and discovering his or her beauty. 

While you may grimace at the idea it is nonetheless true – and I have no desire to sound dramatic – I have sat face-to-face with people deemed ultimate trash by society and a handful afforded me momentary glimpses into their immense beauty. 

Appreciating mountains or a single flower cannot be rushed.

It’s the same with people.

Listen intently. Given time, people will lead you to their unique place of enormous beauty.

There is a fundamental wellness truth that is obvious but missed or avoided by many. I will get to why it is avoided by so many in a moment but first, here it is. Take care of yourself, first. First, mind your own business. 

I don’t mean “mind your own business” in the ways our language and culture usually hears it, as in keep your nose out of other people’s affairs, although that is a really good idea.

By “mind your own business” I mean take care of your own behavior, concerns, worries, reactions, unhappiness, anger, dreams and ambitions – work on your own stuff – before you focus on what others are doing or not doing.

Many conflicts are avoided in my home when I take care of my own attitude rather than get derailed by what my sons are doing or not doing. My sons are easy targets if I am unhappy with myself. The minute I focus my frustrations on them and not on my reactions and responses to what’s going on in me, things get derailed in our home.

I think this approach is avoided because it seems selfish – when it is the very opposite of selfishness. I think it is avoided because it is far easier to project and notice the weaknesses of others than to work on facing our own.

Reflections for those in conflict with others

Try to clarify matters for yourself first. This may take a few days. What do you want? Even if you do not get what you want, what will be the best outcome of this conflict as far as you are concerned? Are you aware of what will satisfy or placate your desire for justice or bring you a measure of peace? Will you feel better for being proved right and your opponent (former partner, friend, whomever) for being proved wrong? Is this even about who is right and who is wrong or winning and losing? Are you able to say what it is about?

Are you able to see and articulate the perspective of he or she or they who are on the other side of this conflict with you? The opposing views may seem ridiculous and unreasonable to you but until you are able to see things from your opponent’s point of view you may be blinded to some aspects the opposition find reasonable. We all have blidspots. There are far more than two sides to every story (conflict, breakup, cut-off) and trying to see as many as possible will empower you for greater humility and equip you with kindness you may now not feel you want or need.

Edwin Fillies and Wilson Goeda – in Durban this week – are a formidable team. They have unparalleled face-to-face experience with diverse cultures and have paved the way for many with deep divisions and historic conflicts to find unlikely reconciliation. 

Yes, unparalleled experience. Addressing audiences in excess of 75 countries between them is hard to match. 

Fillies and Goeda have offered seminars and orchestrated encounters with tens of thousands world-wide.

Although hard to prove, I should think their track records and flight patterns place them among the most well-traveled of all South Africans, ever.  

Hailing originally from Brandwag (Western Cape) Humansdorp (Eastern Cape), they are miracles, practiced artists in matters of understanding and reconciliation, approaching opportunities with tranquil humility, embodying courage demanded of their high calling.

One of them, and I don’t say this lightly, is even very funny. 

“Our message is restoration of identity, dignity, destiny of individuals, communities and nations. We work in the area of peace building, reconciliation, mediation,” says Edwin.

If you run anything involving groups of people and you want to expand your knowledge of your nation, its diversity, complexities, its vast potential for grace, let me know. I will put you in touch with Wilson and Edwin.

Part of their appeal is that they have chosen to spread a message of humility and love, a tough sell, often resisted, anywhere and everywhere in the world.

“I am married to the nicest man, loving, caring, generous. However, put him in a car and we have road-rage coupled with racism. We are about to embark on a very long road trip and I’m already wondering how I’m going to cope. Presently, I just look the other way and try and try to ignore it, but I find it so stressful. It is not easy at all. Can you advise me on this?”

So, driving “transforms” your “nicest man,” who is “loving, caring, generous” into a road raging racist. This backdrop – the fact he is capable of being loving and caring – suggests your husband is fully capable of a heart-to-heart conversation with you before you leave the house.

If such a conversation ignites his anger then I’d suggest you are in some understandable denial about how loving and caring and generous he is.

Tell your husband that his raging and racist responses to the environment when he is driving ruins the trip for you. Tell him what you experience when he rages. While you “look the other way” he has no need to try to control his lurking unresolved anger and race issues.

Driving doesn’t cause anger and frustration and racist attitudes, it exposes what is already living within the heart.

“I’ve had worse partings, but none still so gnaws my mind,” writes Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis in “Walking Away.”

Observing from a distance, Day-Lewis sees his young son disappear into a throng of boys each beginning a new phase of life at boarding school.

“… like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away,

Behind a scatter of boys.“

Day-Lewis knows the inevitable separation that is necessary for his son’s selfhood, independence, then, interdependence. It nonetheless “gnaws” despite his acknowledgment of “nature’s give and take.”

“Selfhood begins with walking away and love is proved in letting go,” concludes Day-Lewis.

I have treasured this poem for decades, read it many times while growing up.

It helped me to know my own walking away was indeed necessary.

It helped me frame the pain, the confusion I caused and saw evidenced on my beloved mother’s face, when on rare occasions, I had the humility and awareness to see it. It gave a glimpse into my father’s helpless shrug admitting powerlessness over my aloof, indifferent swagger.

I knew instinctively that everything living requires space, room to grow, a safe and secure nest; a den simultaneously free and open, open to accept the ebbs and flows of life, growth, success, and disappointments, angry departures, humble returns.

Now that my sons, both of whom I adopted at birth, are young adults I read “Walking Away” differently than I did before.

I have had a ring-side seat.

I’ve watched two boys learn to crawl, walk, then run towards manhood and the only thing that “gnaws at my mind” about their reaching manhood is that it all happened so rapidly.

My sons are warm men. They are respectful of authority, hard-workers, each earning an honest day’s living, both of whom I have watched learn to walk, and walk away, and walk alongside, and walk behind, and rush on ahead. In all this walking, miles, miles, and more miles, they have become magnificently more and more of the man each is ordained to be.

Yes, like Day-Lewis, I have pained at certain times, during certain phases, as I have watched them walk and watched them fall. Their “falls” are cushioned with the knowledge that I too have run ahead of myself and yes, fallen myself, more often than I have been open to admit – especially to each of them.

But, preeminently, the pain that has persistently hit me hardest, and gnaws at a primal depth, is the ongoing awareness of what it took for their birth mothers, defying even “nature’s give and take,” to Walk Away.

Day-Lewis says the separation gnaws at his mind and I get that. I know that pain. But, it is “clean” pain. It is a pain that every rational, reasonable parent knows is inevitable and accepts with accommodating grace, even prepares for it.

When juxtaposed with what our two heroic birth mothers volunteered to endure, our pain, Cecil Day-Lewis’s and mine, and perhaps yours, is surely a mere, ever-healing, diminishing bump or bruise, a “charlie-horse.”

I indeed have gotten gifts from two women, gifts that “keep on giving” but they, these two powerful and generous women, gave gifts that surely keep on wrenching, churning, gnawing and pulling, shoving, year-by-year, birthday-by-birthday within the deepest recesses of their minds and souls.

How much thank you is enough, all birth mothers everywhere?

Take a bow.

Hear a thunderous applause from men and women whom you made dads and moms in every time zone and on every continent.

There is no thank you loud and broad and high and deep enough that will ever suffice.

Then, I am amazed at what strength and resilience has been demanded of each of my boys to know his mother walked away and was motivated to do so by love.

Love, love, and more love, drove their choices in the hopes, belief, faith that each boy would be positioned to walk away and walk toward a life each birth mother had the foresight, the strength, the humility, and the character to know that she herself would find impossible to provide for this newborn baby whom she so dearly loved – and loved enough to walk away.

Writers search within themselves for opening lines. Like athletes may recall a winning goal or an impossible rugby try, we admire a good one. My all-time favorite is Frederick Buechner’s opener of his memoir “Telling Secrets.” It lulls. It seduces. Then, all in one sentence, it delivers an unforgettable punch. I’d love to know how long it took him to perfect.

Buechner’s opener recalls that early one morning his father popped into the bedroom preteen-Frederick shared with his brother – the sentence suggests something habitual or repetitive is occurring – and then made his way to the garage, where within minutes, his father died at his own hand from exhaust fumes.

The sad event, the dad, the loss was never explained or referred to or talked about. Not ever.

The opener hit me hard as intended. Bullseye. The words on the page parraleled what suicide does to survivors. It takes us by complete surprise and it is then often locked away within forever, layered in shame, buried in secrecy, hidden like a lost or hidden grave.

Please, get the help you need, before you make a permanent choice over what are most surely powerful and driving destructive emotions. Help is available. There are armies of people waiting to help you.