In the previous post I stated that I’d give examples of situations where compassion and surprise (which is linked to creativity) worked when (I believe anyway) nothing else would have worked.
This incident happened many years ago one night, quite late, doing streetwork.
It was in a dimly lit corner of a housing estate and I was with a female colleague. We were with some young men who were obviously stoned and a row broke out and it got quite serious.
One man who I felt was higher on drugs than the others pulled a knife and swung it in the direction of the face of the young man he was having the row with. He cut him on the forehead – and some blood immediately began to ooze out. The volume of the shouting and roaring rose and two or three on each side began to adopt the fight position as another knife was pulled out. (There was going to be no flight here)! I froze.
I was not expecting this – it had blown up out of nowhere. My immediate thoughts were that someone might be killed or seriously injured. I hadn’t a clue what to do – all young men were way beyond bargaining and I felt that anything I did would make a bad situation worse. We were also far away from everywhere – i.e. help was not nearby, mobile phones hadn’t been invented, and it was also late at night – everything was closed.
But I decided that I’d have to do something – perhaps shout louder than all the others with threatening statements about doing life in prison, is it worth it, etc. – a kind of desperate final effort to impose my adult authority and, through fear of dire consequences, make the young men think!
(Now it must be remembered that all the above happened in a split second).
My colleague, however, was not at all in the state of panic that I was in. Acting on what I can only assume was her womanly intuition she leaned forward, and without saying a word, with a white tissue, wiped the blood off the forehead of the young man that had the cut.
In another split second the entire atmosphere changed.
Calmness descended on the entire scene. Knives were put away. The young men’s body language changed from aggressive fight position to a kind of fuck it resignation. After a tense moment or two they went their separate ways.
As we debriefed later my colleague told me that she only saw the wound, and she was oblivious to everything else. We were trying to analyse it, but it was beyond analysis at that time.