For a long time, I have battled storms that blew up when I was least expecting them, although looking back the first tremors were always there, just under the surface as warnings of trouble brewing ahead.
I want to live in a neighbourhood where people behave fairly, consistently and kindly, and where my needs for peace are understood and met. I want consideration and an end to hostility and aggression. What I most want is accountability. For people to own their mistakes and see their antisocial or aggressive behaviour for what it is – a way of avoiding the truth.
People behave in self-interested ways when they forget they are interconnected with everyone else. A neighbourhood is a community in microcosm. Living in close proximity to others as many of us do means we cannot behave as if we live on an island of one. Except some people do. It always dismays me when I encounter self-interest in the extreme. How to encourage co-operation and collaboration when people see no personal benefit to themselves is, I believe, the question for our current times.
Why should I give up what I want to do for the sake of others? Most of us will confront this question at some point in our lives. Many will use personal gain as a gauge of whether they have won or lost. I got the better of her, therefore I win, is a familiar thought pattern. The I win, you lose mentality is everywhere you choose to look, in all our systems and the effect is to make those who do not operate under this principle feel gaslighted by simply attempting to stand their ground and advance a different way of being.
In the horse kingdom, the bullies and the antisocial herd members are often exiled. Horses understand cooperative living in a nuanced way. They know that if one horse insists on having his own way the whole time, the rest of the herd will suffer. Horses do not tiptoe around issues of an inability to live in harmony. They know what is required for order and they will act to enforce harmony if it is required.
Dogs will do the same. Large roaming groups of dogs live off rubbish dumps in many parts of the world and the dogs are often in competition for the best scraps of food. Squabbles might arise over a bone, which might sound fierce, but is usually over in seconds. Consider how often we engage in petty parking disputes or how long we will keep conflicts going over resources, or how we might withhold food as a weapon of war.
Dogs, horses and other social mammals are self organising in ways that put the whole group interest before the individual rights of one especially powerful or manipulative being. The whole matters more than individual survival. The whole promotes the individual to flourish.
In organising their societies so that everyone may flourish, the animals are putting into action, principles for harmony promoted by the Ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. They advocated friendliness as the makings of a good life.
Neighbourhoods can be wonderful places of mutual support and goodnatured cheer. They can also become sectarian war zones, divided by walls and barbed wire. Children growing up in such places learn to hate and to fear. Friendliness is valued less than the ability to judge and take sides.
Perhaps it is because friendliness comes so naturally to us that we don’t value it as much as we could. Indeed, we often pay any attention to it only when it has gone.
To return to friendliness as our starting point for all our social interactions, would literally change the word. If we adopted the open-hearted way of dogs who are well socialised or horses who live with other animals they trust, every encounter we make could be beautiful and could advance society faster than technology.
Watching The Shark Whisperer last night made me wonder about human aggression and fear. More than 100 million sharks a year are slaughtered because they are not considered valuable enough to live in the oceans they have inhabited for periods of time long before we humans even existed. The world is out of balance and we have made it so. In trying to tip the balance in our favour, we have distorted all that is natural, beautiful and wise. Many of us are brokenhearted at what we have done.
It is not too late to make amends. Conflict , suffering and destruction can be healed. For every hurt we inflict, there is a way to honour instead, to create, build bridges and show love and respect. To begin we can look to the animals who do much of their living in the realm of silent consciousness, the place of connection beyond words.
We know that place, too. It is the shelter from the storm, the refuge and place of safety we call home. The place where we all land together.
Horsemanship for Health 