A contest without tension
At the end of 1955, the days between Christmas Eve and New Year were outwardly quiet for Hammarskjöld. His desk calendar reflects no high dramas. But there is a cluster of 17 entries for the period in his private journal, Markings; it was a time of intensified personal inquiry. The entries range in focus from clear-minded self-criticism to what can honestly be described as mysteries of the inner life—the life of spiritual search, stumble, and discovery. The entry below belongs to both worlds: it begins in sharp self-criticism, passes in review a worn but useful strategy, and ends with stunning insights.
Hammarskjöld wrote:
When you are irritated by his "pretentiousness", you betray the character of your own: it is just as it should be that he increases while you decrease. Choose your opponents. To the wrong ones, you cannot afford to give a thought, but you must help the right ones, help them and yourself in a contest without tension.
(Markings, 119)
Hammarskjöld had learned that others are a mirror. They are what they are, wholly independent—yet how he responded to them told him something of himself, and he was alert to those messages. His mature approach was an altogether practical application of the Gospel teaching about mote and beam (
Matthew 7:3), self and other. Insofar as one can, he was still shaping himself, doing his part.
In this instance, he detects in his irritation with what must have been a pretentious colleague a sign of his own pretentiousness. He calls on himself to obey the truism: choose your battles, choose your opponents. And at that point a transformation of meaning occurs, a jump up into a world where breadth of vision and clarity of intention override routine. Help your chosen opponent, he writes, help your opponent and yourself. Do so in a contest without tension.
We are now squarely again in Hammarskjöld’s world. An ordinary situation, and an unremarkable though diligent response to it, opens out into a large perception with an implicit challenge.
But what does it mean to help one’s chosen opponents? To help them see the error of their ways? It can’t be that—too coarse for Hammarskjöld. To help them be clearer in debate, truer to their own vision—until they see the error of their ways? Maybe that’s closer to what he means, but the self-satisfied little triumph at the end is still not Hammarskjöld. To help them, and yourself, by working together to get to the bottom of a disputed issue and reach a shared understanding by which each learns? That must be closer still. All this duly noted, the counsel to help one’s chosen opponent retains its enigmatic light, its provocation.
"In a contest without tension." The Sjöberg/Auden translation here is a marvel, possibly more striking than Hammarskjold’s own "i avspänd tävlan," which could be translated less elegantly but accurately as "in relaxed competition." In either version, here unmistakably is the second challenge, and here is where his two worlds meet.
In the political and diplomatic world, clarity of mind and endurance are crucial. They are the basis for sustained perceptiveness, which allows one to evaluate wisely and participate usefully in debates and situations as they move on. It’s hard to imagine sustained perceptiveness without some quality of relaxation.
In the world of the spiritual seeker, tension blinds and separates, creates artificial boundaries where there need be none. It clouds the mind, distorts feelings, cramps the body. Hammarskjöld knew the value of a certain ease as a precondition for approaching his own internal "Room of Quiet" (to borrow his name, still in use, for the meditation room on the ground floor of UN headquarters).
None of us need be Hammarskjöld. He was what he was, wholly independent. But he left this signpost among others: help the chosen opponent in a contest without tension. It is surprisingly attractive as a course of action.
