On Getting Along
I don’t remember it being so difficult to reach across an ideological divide when I was younger. Maybe that’s because ideological divides weren’t as pronounced, but they did exist. People from any cultural group had a different view of the world.
It’s also likely the case that I just didn’t realize that ideologies are encroached in people’s being because I was a kid and only saw the world through the lens of adolescence. As you get older, that’s when you realize the ways people interpret the world affects your interactions with them.
But when I turn off my phone and venture to the world outside or sit alone with a book or go on a walk, I’m reminded that there’s something serene about existence that we can access at any time. We always have the option to just be.
Part of the process of doing that is in some ways a process of getting along, with oneself and with one’s environment. In that agreement there’s a compromise. You have to accept the realization that you’re limited, that you can’t be all you wish to be and that the environment itself can’t be all you wish it to be. Reality isn’t what you imagine but what you’re experiencing and living in. That, in some ways, seems to be the prize of a mentally sound person. As Drew Pinsky says, “Mental health isn’t always about feeling good. As I define it, mental health is about accepting reality on reality’s terms.”
That sort of acceptance of reality gets us closer to a place where we can allow moderation, conversation, and compromise. We aren’t threatened by what we don’t have, or fighting so hard for what we want. We can sit with our serenity to figure out the next and right course of action. And others become partners to work with toward common goals, rather than foes that are infringing on our path.
We can aim for a result that isn’t possessed by our narratives, but one that realizes the usefulness in each person’s thoughts and realizes the full nuance of those thoughts. I don’t think this is a far-fetched proposition either. It might flirt with the idealistic, but in history we do see those examples of those that can reach across divide toward compromise. Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader and ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield is one of those examples.
Mansfield’s fellow senators would say he had “integrity, decency, and honor,” among various other positive qualities. As his biographer Don Oberdorfer writes, “It is inconceivable that a party leader in the contemporary Senate could obtain a unanimous vote of that body to investigate the election misdeeds of a sitting president of the other party — but Mansfield did that to begin the Watergate investigation in 1973. It is hardly likely that a U.S. ambassador, appointed from the political ranks, could obtain and retain the confidence of successive presidents of opposing philosophies and political parties — but Mansfield did that as ambassador to Japan under both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.”
Mike Mansfield would have breakfast with members of the opposing party, and his success as a US Senator and diplomat shows that this approach works.
In a cultural climate where everything stirs a reaction, the example of Mansfield is strong. It’s possible to bridge divides and find ways to coexist. Mansfield knew how to facilitate the other. He knew how to be diplomatic. Because navigating the world inherently means navigating the other, and only through properly doing that can we, like Mansfield, get along.
