On most real life
days off the page, I have to confess I wouldn’t mind life with fewer
antagonists where I easily skipped to my goal. But they often seem to appear
uninvited, whether you want them or not. Writing often reflects real life, and
the more I think about it, antagonists in our life do play an important role, just not always a pleasant one.
We’ve all had them – neighbors who let their trees grow to
block your vegetable garden, preventing you from growing produce to be canned
and donated to the local food pantry (a benign example). There are the people
who rear-end you at a stop light, but manage to convince a police officer and a
judge that they are the innocent victim. The folks who have lied about you,
either at work, or school, or even within your own families. Maybe they haven’t
quite lied about you, but they use details out of context to manipulate
opinions to their own advantage. Some antagonists try and destroy your goal of
having a happy, life-long marriage by intervening with your spouse. They
prevent your kids from reaching their goal of attending school without
antagonism, or remaining drug free. And on and on this list goes. I
simply call these folks “difficult people,” but they are really antagonists,
preventing us from reaching our goals.
Along the way though, they have something very valuable to
give us. Without them, we would, indeed, remain flat, as would our lives. Think
about having coffee weekly with someone whose life never changed, never had
drama, never had movement or conflict or difficulty. Yawn.
Antagonists force us to look at ourselves and examine what
we want, how we’re willing to get it, and what we’re prepared to do if that
goal is unattainable. Sometimes the results are surprising. Many a person has spent
years winding their way to a dream goal, only to look back at the route that
resembled the Israelites wandering in the desert for forty years, but
the roundabout journey changed them for the good and prepared them best for the
work ahead.
For example, if we look at how we respond to
folks who lie about us, most would flunk the exam. We usually respond terribly
to mistreatment, only learning with practice not to be threatened by these
folks and to keep a proper perspective. If we can look at these troubles as delightful
messengers, sent to grow us and produce positive change within us, eventually our
lives are enriched in unexpected ways, and those difficult antagonists lose all
their power and momentum because you never followed their model of behavior.
Isn’t it interesting to think the difficult people in our lives actually play a
meaningful role? Is there any better way
to dull an antagonist’s negative impact on your life than to flip it upside
down and let good come of it?
Bring on the antagonists!
