Get into a Fight – Part 1

I have been in a number of fights, and have good memories of them – that sounds messed up – let me explain.

Competing against another person can be rough, but has a fun side to it, otherwise sports wouldn’t be so ubiquitous. Fighting is a competition, like physical chess. It can be exhilarating being placed in an uncommon experience where, for a short time, you are challenged to go all out against another person, with a lot at risk. The reason why I have good memories of most of my fights was because I got to experience this exhilarating situation, no real damage was done, and I became friends with the person(s) after this shared experience. There are a couple notable exceptions, which brings us to the dark side of fighting.

The negative aspects of a fight involve the same poor thinking and risk of damage as other poor choices we make in life. People can get hurt, and unnecessarily as the motivation for the fight, even verbal or emotional fights, is often unwarranted. This world has enough pain and challenge, so we don’t need more people attacking each other for unreasonable reasons.

And you can trace the reasons for any fight, back to the differing ideas or beliefs, which led to the fight. Maybe they differed on what soccer team was better; or maybe one person thought they could act a certain way toward another person, who took exception to the treatment; or maybe someone believed trying to make moves on another’s boyfriend was a good idea. Think of some fight you were in, how did your beliefs about the issue conflict with the other person’s? Was it worth the fight?

Each person has to decide for themselves what ideas are or are not worth fighting for, and it seems like a straight-forward calculation to make: consider all the positive results to be gained and the probability of reaching them, then subtract all the negatives potentially occurring because of the fight and the likelihood of these negative impacts to determine if the fight would be worth it.

Yet, many physical and emotional fights are more about taking a shot at a person we are angry with, and with this being the only positive result sought, the fight is a negative investment. So many of the physical and emotional fights we engage in only have the potential to bring shallow positive results, but deep and impactful negative consequences, making many of our fights a foolish investment.

From the day-to-day foolish fights, to the darker fights resulting from a nasty vicariousness people have shown from the playgrounds of elementary school, where we encouraged or hoped a couple kids we knew would fight, through adulthood and through history, which has pitted man against man, a person against a group, person against animal, animal against animal, any variety of fight-to-the-death gladiator games, all displaying alarming levels of repulsiveness.

However, there is a situation demanding a fight to the finish, and this fight brings very impactful positive benefits – for both sides – far outweighing the negative side of the fight. How is this possible? By keeping the fight between the ideas. In fact, not regularly holding fights to the death between ideas brings the highest level of negative consequences.