If I could summarize nonviolence in one word, it would be: patience.
KHAN ABDUL GHAFFAR KHAN
via Gratefulness.org
Mondays bring a whole new challenge to the idea of nonviolence.
This sounds petty, on the face of it. In my office I am not facing machine guns or molotov cocktails or even pepper spray. I face words, spoken by coworkers or written in emails. This should not constitute a great obstacle to my personal pacifism, but frequently two or three of those words gang up together and tap dance on my very last nerve, especially on Mondays when the whole world seems to enjoy opening up and dumping on me at once. Probably you know this feeling.
We’re not alone in this. If you dig deep into th
oose international conflicts that do put people’s lives in danger, though, you find they mostly start with words. “This belongs to us, not you” or “You did this to us” or any number of other grievances that the speaker and the listener couldn’t agree on. These words don’t live in a vacuum. They come attached to strong feelings, and those feelings don’t get resolved, and pretty soon hurting the other side with words doesn’t dull the pain and it has to be passed on in some physical way.
Khan Abdul Gaffer Khan, a man devoted to peace and known as the “Muslim Gandhi,” might not think keeping peace in the office is petty at all. If the only way to keep the world safe is to figure out how to deal with sentences that use tap dancing for evil, Mondays are the front lines of battle.
Kimberly knows a place where it isn’t Monday right now.
