The broken sign: conflict as misdirection.

What an angry dog walk taught me about the roots of conflict and the way through locked gates.

A broken sign and a locked gate - offering no meaning other than what I make it.

I paused as I walked down the narrow lane on one of my usual dog walks.

Something was different about the gate I’d passed.

I’d seen a 4x4 go through it the other day, driven by some local farmers that I recognised.

I walked back and took a look at the five bar gate, noticing a new black strap tied around it, securing it to the fence post.

It was pretty tightly knotted and didn’t look easy to unpick.

This irked me a bit as I sometimes walked through there, one of the few public footpaths in our village, something that I really value.

I noticed something else: the top of the thick wooden post had some damage to it, like something had been snapped off.

I was sure there had been a ‘Footpath’ sign attached to it and I looked like it had been crudely removed.

I decided to carry on the walk I’d planned, but part of me stewed over what I’d seen.

I felt a bit angry that a landowner might have deliberately prevented people from accessing this public resource - and even more so that they’d pretty much vandalised the way marking to discourage walkers from trying to come through.

This matters a lot to me because I deeply value access to nature.

We’re cut off from so much of the land around us - less than 8% of England is designated as open access.

This affects people’s wellbeing and prevents us from feeling connected to the ecology around us, having a subtle but powerful relationship on how we feel about our part in it.

Trudging through the long grass, half dragging, half being-dragged by my dogs, I steadied my mind by thinking about why the farmer had done this.

I remembered that they also own one of the fields up the road and the footpath through there is strewn with dog muck.

I find this pretty horrible as a walker but I’ve often wondered how the people growing crops in that field feel about the faeces that rots into the ground (ultimately absorbed into the food that ends up on people’s dinner plates).

This recognition allowed me to feel some understanding and the difficult feelings eased.

I stopped feeling so personally affronted - like my need to walk that path was all that mattered and someone was deliberately preventing me from doing so.

Still, I thought, that’s not on. Not only did it feel wrong in principle and representing some bigger problem, it will be breaching some by-law.

I turned over different ways to approach the problem - knowing that by creatively taking responsibility for something that matters to me is a good way to approach this potential conflicts.

Instead of punishing them by reporting the issue to the local authority (my first knee-jerk reaction), I could replace the strap with a chain and latch for them?

My route took me back past the gate and my self-righteous indignation started kicking in again.

I didn’t need to go through it but I felt that I should.

So taking the right hand turn off the lane I approached the gate.

I noticed that the drive of the house next to it joined with the approach to the field and that there was a tiny footpath arrow on a telegraph pole sitting between the two.

I wandered half-way up the drive to find a wooden stile with ‘Public Footpath’ clearly carved into the top bar.

I suddenly realised that all this time I’d been walking through the wrong gate, across a small stretch of that privately-owned field, when the actual public access had been five metres around the corner.

Suddenly all the judgement and ideas of conflict vanished.

I realised that it was my false assumptions and habitual behaviours that had created the idea of wrongdoing, which had in turn created the idea that there was a conflict.

I’d been walking through the wrong gate all that time.

I’d then assumed that my access had been denied.

I then looked for further evidence of wrongdoing, which I readily found when I saw the damaged gate post and could imagine someone had vandalised it.

This half an hour of my mundane, daily dog walk was a glimpse into nearly every conflict I’ve ever experienced.

Any time I’m affronted by someone or something it’s because I’ve assumed an act was done with a malign intention.

I’ve literally taken it personally.

If I can learn how to bring empathy into that process, by inquiring into why someone may have chosen to do that based on their own needs, then that judgement starts to lose its hold and the difficult feelings subside.

And by getting as close as I can to the actual truth - by investigating the reality of what I’ve perceived - I can see that all the conflict started with me.

It’s my ‘self’ that makes the meaning of what happens around me. So when something feels difficult, upsetting or frustrating, it’s because I have made that meaning of it.

It happens so automatically and unconsciously that I can fool myself time and time again that it’s always someone or something else making me feel this way.

But when I look carefully - if I allow my nervous system to settle and my triggered self to take its foot off the pedal - I can see that the world around me isn’t there to get in my way, it’s just doing its thing.

And rather than finding barriers and challenges wherever I go, I realise that there is always a way through, if I can allow myself to find the right pathway.

If you’re interested in learning more about these ideas, my course ‘How to Fight Well’ starts a new run on the 5th November.

Email hello@maxstjohn.com if you’d like to join.