In his wonderful poem “Sometimes” (from Everything is Waiting for You, 2007, Many Rivers Press), David Whyte refers to questions that “have no right to go away”. I really like that statement and it touched a chord in me. So, considering my fascination with the art of inquiry I thought about using Whyte’s phrase as the title and premise of this week’s blog.

It seems that when we are in interpersonal conflict we ask ourselves many things about what is going on between the other person…

We know that conflict has the potential for bringing out negativity in us when we are in dispute with another person. What form and shape that takes varies, of course, and depends in large part on our individual ways of coping, the circumstances, who the other person is, and the history with her or him. Negativity that erupts in any case seems to increase as we become more and more entrenched and the certainty about our rightness and the other person’s wrongness prevails. We may…

It seems statements that go like, “I didn’t mean it that way” are ones we use when something we said or how we said it is misinterpreted by another person and offends her or him. Or, it may be a gesture that is misread. In either case, as a consequence of the other person’s reaction to us and the realization that our words or actions are perceived in a way that is not intended, we attempt to defend ourselves and explain what we meant. This is when we may utter phrases like, “I didn’t mean it…

The colour red is a symbol for many different things, such as blood, a signal to stop, heat, and a warning. In the conflict context we sometimes use the expression seeing red to describe our reaction to something another person did or said that offends us. This phrase reportedly “derives from the sport of bull-fighting and the toreador’s use of a red cape to deceive the bull”. The explanation goes though…