I’m back on track myself, back in the office, almost remembering not to swear. It’s hard to be good for so many hours a day though, and I usually burst out into full Lisa at about 2pm - luckily many of my colleagues are parents of teenage girls and battle-hardened to truculence.
My holiday plans included a Great Walk and in true form I sprained my ankle four days before I was due to start the Heaphy. I’d moved a tree in the garden, forgot about the hole, and stepped in it. Crunch. By the time I was heading northwards, pimp-walking around Timaru in pink trackies like the My Little Pony of gangsters, my whole foot was a lovely shade of green. But nobody holidays harder than someone with only two weeks off, so I tramped, swam, biked, ate copious amounts of steak, killed two airbeds (doing absolutely nothing that would warrant it!) and returned to Purakaunui just in time to ring in the new year with an early night and a handful of ibuprofen. I don’t bother with New Year’s resolutions. "Don’t kill anyone" and "Remember to wear pants" is enough, goal-wise.
When you’re on holiday and spending time in places you do not live, one of the best things about it is that you can try out different personalities. Abandon your normal self entirely.
My Achilles heel is that, outside my professional life, I’m not great at talking to other people, and even worse at confrontations. I have a horror of it. If I need to talk to the neighbours about cutting the hedge, for instance, I have to psyche myself up for hours before I can even go over there, and then just end up bursting into tears and waving my hands at the trees while crying and looking at the sky. It’s not a great negotiation tactic.
I can also be very judge-y. If someone’s political or moral views don’t align with mine, I think they are a moron.
Not on my summer holiday though, where I wore a cloak of friendliness and talked to lots of strangers. I became a veritable Chatty Woman, nattering to everyone from a trans woman in the Kahurangi National Park, a Māori dude broken down on the side of the road in Little Wanganui, a surf shop owner in Westport, a farmer, a fisherman ... I talked to everyone, and I learned something good.
You can get along with people, feel empathy and even like them, despite their opinions being completely different from your own.
I talked to people who were politically my polar opposite, who thought the new government was great, who hated the beach (something which would normally have me reaching for the pepper spray), and I just decided to listen, to get along. And you know what? People are people. You can even be friends with someone who doesn’t have any tattoos.
Things were getting pretty divided for a while there in New Zealand. Last year it felt like everyone was angry and mean all of the time. We seemed to have got to a place where we just couldn’t handle anyone whose opinion didn’t chime with ours. If they weren’t singing from the same song sheet, they were out of tune, and insane.
I’m not saying you should march down the aisle to Pachelbel’s Canon in D with the nearest neo-Nazi, just ... let’s start fresh, eh? Can we all just try to get along?
Getting along is a personal choice. Our inability to navigate difference is learnt behaviour, but we can un-learn it.
As a country, we are all in a relationship with each other. Think of it like having a weird sexual attraction to a guy who really isn’t your type. And while the old adage "opposites attract" isn’t necessarily true (otherwise I’d be married to a right-wing accountant) - attraction does come in the small adjustments that people make to each other, the incremental compromises, from each and to each, accepting difference, smoothing conflict and tension.
And therein lies love.
