I believe it’s incredibly important to share the “daily victories” I’m experiencing right now. On the one hand, I often encourage people on my blog to trust themselves and love themselves — which means my personal examples show what this kind of love can actually lead to.
On the other hand, I try to capture these victories in the moment, because in that moment I’m vulnerable in a way I might never be again — it may be the last chance to look at my past self through the eyes of my present self, and thus a chance to preserve the person who needed help. So when I share stories of victory, I also share the stories of how long I had been enduring defeat.
I’ll start with something that happened on November 28th — I was flying to Prague on a morning flight, most passengers trying to catch some sleep. I’m sitting in the last row; a few men are loudly drinking and talking near the restroom. I can see passengers shooting annoyed looks at them, and they’re bothering me as well — they’re crossing some unspoken norm of decency about how loudly one is “allowed” to talk on a plane.
At some point, when one of them shouts again, I say:
“Excuse me, could you please be quieter?”
I spent a long time choosing a wording that would be firm enough and yet completely non-aggressive. They simply apologized, toned it down (for a while, at least), and passengers around me visibly relaxed — probably because they saw the men weren’t confrontational, just tipsy.
And now the question: what made me — a rather average-sized man — address three drunk, lively, and robust Hungarians? The answer is simple: I didn’t see a conflict.
I saw a few people unaware of the noise they were making, and a few people unsure how to tell them. I simply removed the expectations gap inside our spontaneously formed social group. Could they have escalated? Yes — and I had a few steps prepared in my head. If they resisted verbally (“Do you disrespect us?” “Who do you think you are?”), I’d calmly explain that this wasn’t about them, but about other passengers’ (and my own!) right to rest.
If they tried to use force — well, then I’d scream for help, call the flight attendants and the police.
But honestly, I didn’t believe they had any motivation to harm fellow passengers. And I was right — later they even invited me to drink with them, apparently as a gesture of apology.
I don’t usually like splitting stories into two parts, but here I think a small pause before the next episode (coming tomorrow) makes sense. A pause to let one thought settle: in an enormous number of cases, what looks like a conflict is actually just a mismatch in expectations.
Here — a classic mismatch between the norms of a quiet, sober person and a loud, drunk one. Sometimes it’s a mismatch of norms between people from different cultures. In other cases — differently interpreted agreements.
In any case, just as they say the best fight is the one you avoid, the best conflict is the one that never happened.