Following the rules

 [This is taken from an excellent longer article, the link to which is below]

Every couple will eventually have some version of the “Let’s Make a Rule” fight, where they try to solve some interpersonal issue through legislation. “You think I don’t take enough interest in your life, so let’s make a rule: I have to ask you three things about your day before I start telling you about mine.” The theory behind the Let’s Make a Rule fight is that we could live in harmony with one another if we could just compile all of our expectations into one big Google Doc.

The Let’s Make a Rule fight never leads to a satisfying conclusion because nobody actually wants their partner to follow the rules. They want their partner to care. Being asked “How was your day, dear?” through gritted teeth because that’s what our Relationship Handbook says to do is probably worse than not being asked at all.

You want your partner to realize that your preferences are not silly affectations that can be belittled, ignored, or disputed until they go away, that they are, in fact, load-bearing parts of your personality, and to reject them is to reject you. In return, you have to realize that some of your preferences are more malleable than you thought, that maybe they don’t all have to be foundational to your sense of self, and that some of them can be bent or jettisoned in the interests of coexistence.

This is the work of love, and it takes a lifetime. You can’t speedrun it by filling out a spreadsheet or signing a contract. The frictions of a lifelong relationship can be made intelligible—that is, understandable to the people involved, but they cannot be made legible—that is, understandable to everyone else.

The best couples I know have all sorts of arrangements and accommodations that make zero sense to me but perfect sense to them, and that’s exactly why they work well together. A successful relationship is nothing more than a package of haphazard remedies and rickety fixes that people would only ever devise and maintain when they really, really want to be together.

Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History

Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!

Good advice

There is nobody like Golda for seeing what needs doing—or saying.
She is always telling people: "Don’t be so humble—you’re not that great."

Simcha Dinitz, aide to Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel 1969-1974,
New York Times interview, March 1969

 

 

 

 

 

 

One question

One of the cheapest commodities in the world is unfulfilled genius.
All of us want to be known as a unique individual,
the one who broke out of the pack.
So, you offer yourself up as a sacrifice and what you're afraid of
is losing and being thrown back into the pack.
One question taunts you.
Do you want to have, or do you want to be?

                Leon Uris, Mitla Pass

Here and now

This is what you must be like.
Grow wherever life puts you down.

            Ben Okri, The Famished Road

 

 

 

 

Change starts here

If you want to change the world, change yourself.

                    Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 

 

 

 

 

 

Pay attention

The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

            Simone Weil, Waiting on God

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Tornado Imagined from Far Away

Up from the south it came, out of the
west, at a diagonal,
fifty miles in its full course,
once it was done—and in its body length, each
time it touched down, from a mile long
to twenty miles. “All we could see
was a lot of gray and stuff.” “It was like
a train, but much louder.” “All we saw was this
white wall of water, if you will.”
Witnesses reported funnel
clouds setting down eleven times, like
anteater noses looking for something,
or a grayish teat growing down
to search out and eat,
but of course it was just cold and heat,
wet and dry, wind, counter-
clockwise force. One life
ended, within a collapsed home,
curled around her stepson’s infant son.
Some homes almost disappeared,
as if the atoms that had made them were gone,
and many homes now partially stand, as if
gored, or chewed on. And how many trees,
how many hairs on a head, torn out,
how many plants turned back from discrete
beings into wads of matter.
Pine, oak, maple, beech,
hemlock, witch hazel, lady’s slipper,
pitcher plant, trillium,
Indian pipe. Gardens, trails—
by a waterfall, a bench, gone in one
bite, dissolved like a grain of salt, as if
thousands of years passed in a minute,
as if we jumped the Pleistocene
to the Hiroshimal. But it’s just weather.
Friend, let us be good to one another.

                   Sharon Olds