A Volley from the Canon, #82, "And the Award for Avoidance Goes to..."

A VOLLEY FROM THE CANON, NUMBER 82

“And the Award for Avoidance Goes to….”

I’ve recently caught on to a powerful technique for avoiding actually dealing with an unpleasant reality. It’s subtle, and it works every time.

What we can do--when presented with an unpalatable quandary, the solution to which will be difficult, complex, and controversial, however necessary-- is put off that unpleasantness indefinitely by discussing and arguing over the CAUSES of the quandary. In reality, of course, the causes are of little consequence at this point. In any case, there is nothing to be done about them, and all of our points about them may be quite valid to some degree. However, discussing the causes is endlessly fascinating. Everyone has an opinion about it, most of those opinions may be at least partly correct, and no one can disprove any of them. The endless discussion accomplishes its purposes, though: first, we get the pleasure of assigning blame, preferably as far from ourselves as possible. Second, the fixation on causes prevents us having to have the more difficult discussion about what to do, or to engage in the hard work of implementing a plan, or to face the inevitable conflict any plan that involves change would encounter.

It isn’t that we don’t want to address the matter, oh, no. We just never get around to it. We have to figure out what caused it, first.