You Are Protecting a Score No One Is Counting
An argument broke out during my commute today. Two men were going at it hard in the crowd. One of them lost his cool and switched to his native tongue. The other had no idea what he was saying. He asked him to speak in a common language. The other simply couldn't. His language of anger was native. I could understand both, and I was quietly amused at this strange way of having an argument.
Within minutes the intensity began to drop. One man kept speaking in his native tongue but the other couldn't follow a word. So he started laughing. Because the whole thing had turned absurd. As someone who understood both sides, I knew the man was saying genuinely vicious things. But since the other had no grip on the language, he couldn't engage with it.
His mind couldn't process the words. Without words, it couldn't retrieve the readymade template of attack. You cannot defend against something you don't understand. His internal defensive mechanism never triggered. His bias never triggered. He didn't retaliate because he had no bearings on which direction to go.
Strip away the bias, the defence mechanism, the compulsion to protect your identity, and there is no ground left for anger to stand on. Anger survives because it needs to assert identity. It needs to protect the self and its dignity. Without that internal mechanism, it has no reason to exist.
Without anger, the brain is forced toward the problem itself. Finding the middle ground. The compromise. And that is exactly what both men did eventually. They found a way through the argument. They did it while laughing at each other. Taking shots at each other. Not in a warm way. In the way men usually do.
I found myself wondering what actually triggers anger in us. Is it the shared language, or is it what the language sets off within us? Do we fight to make a point, or to impose one? What if we could train ourselves to ignore the venom that surfaces in an argument and go straight for its core. Why is this happening? What is the ideal outcome? Where is the middle ground?
These simple questions lead either to a solution or a compromise. Compromise feels like a loss because of this deep need to win. To impose yourself. To subjugate. To establish dominance. Without that need, the middle ground would not feel like surrender. You would approach with the basic understanding that two people can each have a legitimate stake in the outcome.
The substance of every argument gets lost because conquest matters more than resolution. And even that conquest comes at the cost of your own peace. You want to win every argument because you are settling the score for all past losses. But the past is gone. And with it, all those wins and losses.
Nobody is keeping score. Nobody will. There will never be a scoreboard except the one in your own head. You are fighting to protect records that exist only in your mind. You have to live in today. And today you have to decide, again, whether you want peace or whether you want to keep the count.