A broken agreement creates upset, by Nancy Chek

On the court, a broken agreement creates upset. For an agreement that has few immediate or known consequences, I might pretend there’s no upset because my pulse doesn’t race uncontrollably and I have no urge to smack whoever broke the agreement. I might convince myself that, indeed, I am taking it remarkably well, and after all there were probably extenuating circumstances, and so on and so forth.  Oh dear no.
On the court, a broken agreement creates upset. Period. Even if I have no physical reactions (or murderous ones), there is a small tear in the fabric of the relationship.  I promised Nancy I’d call someone today, and I didn’t. I not only didn’t call, I didn’t even notice I didn’t call until she said something.
My immediate reaction was that of a child—embarrassed, angry at myself and angry at being caught.  Knee-jerk, bloodstream chemical-jerk.
How long have I been investigating this? Forty years, give or take? Shouldn’t I be able to manage my reactions more effectively by now? It occurs to me that I have avoided practice, i.e, making tons of mistakes and cleaning them up. Instead, I’ve been trying to make no mistakes or at least have them undiscovered, which is very constraining and probably leads to weight gain.  (Think of Lucy Arnaz on the production line at the chocolate factory, unable to keep up with the speed of the conveyor belt and stuffing chocolates in her mouth.)
A couple of weekends ago at our leadership program, the speaker said that the physics of being a human is to break agreements—and to keep on doing that. She said integrity is a participation issue, not a morality issue. By not cleaning up broken agreements, we give up any power that comes from participating with others.
I’m beginning to see that acknowledging a broken agreement and taking action to repair anything that was broken in the process is not about the past but about the future. Is our relationship repaired so we can go forward and make things happen together?
The speaker's last word was: If broken agreements are handled punitively, people will not acknowledge them, and acknowledging them is the only way to repair the break in the relationship.
Sometimes there is significant upset—big upset. And when I’m gravely upset, I do not feel sweet and loveable about it.
Implied agreements seem to carry the most capacity to generate upset when they’re broken. It seems obvious to me that if a friend and I agree to meet outside a movie we are going to see together, we wait until the other shows up. My friend Cathy once went into the movie theatre without me (before I got there); I was not my usual half-hour early. This time I was only 15 minutes early because she had always been late, and I was tired of standing outside in the cold waiting for her. (See the remnants of justification for being mad?) This was before every person on the planet had a cell phone.
That time, I stood outside for 45 minutes and finally went home. Now that I think of it, I have stood outside quite a few theatres waiting for Cathy, who has showed up with a minute to go or late when there were no tickets left. She always blamed the parking. (Did she think I had magic powers that I was able to arrive 30 minutes early in the same neighborhood with the same parking opportunities?)
It was never about missing a movie. It was about never receiving an apology, even when I asked, and concluding how little our friendship meant to her. Then there’s the matter of trust. That’s the future aspect.

My upset has turned into something akin to despair.  Clearly it’s an integrity issue for me not to keep communicating until I get it complete.

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