The Best So Far

 

I'm a week early posting this but you get to a certain age and you realize there's no time to dilly dally.

A letter to those just starting out in committed relationships:

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Dear Newbies,

Hubs and I have had a running joke for 36 years (and counting). He'll say, "You're the best." I reply, "So far."  Then we laugh.

There is a history under this, of course. Given we have both been married more than once we acknowledged, early on, that sometimes you have to practice to make perfect. Somehow, three and half decades into this experiment we seem to have achieved a kind of imperfect perfection. 

I readily admit that the first five years I had a secret PLAN B because I brought three offspring, including two teenagers, to the arrangement. Regardless that he caused his own parents to gray prematurely when he was a teen, he seemed to expect that my teens should think and behave like adults. As one might expect there were some pretty tense days, especially for me, the one in the middle. I was prepared that one day he would announce that 'this was not what he signed up for' and, frankly, I would not have blamed him if he bailed. 

But bail he did not. He hung in through the testy GROWING UP years. Eventually the teens became adults who have had their own teens to deal with. Some might refer to that as karma. I see it as the circle of life. What goes around comes around.

No one can argue that real life isn't messy and for all the drama we've dealt with now and again, I can gratefully say the last 36 years have been way more up than down. Admittedly there have been many challenges, in this ongoing story of practice to perfection. For example, when he decided to start his own business 21 years ago and we had no income for 2 years we tightened the belt, used our Y2K storage and cashed in a 401k to survive. He worked in a home office for several years. To grow the business, instead of taking out a loan, he put our personal property up as collateral for the bonding insurance. It was a gamble but he believed he could do it and I believed in him. 

In the BUILDING YEARS he often put in 12 hour days, his mind always occupied, sometimes myopically obsessed with business. But just as he held on during the TEEN YEARS I held on during the All BUSINESS YEARS. At age 73, two decades later, he sometimes still puts in 10-12 hour days but that is who he is. He is a get-er-done doer and he does not bail when the going gets tough. He just does what has to be done and so he keeps things running in his business life as well as in our home life. I have often referred to our union as being synergistic. He is the mechanic who makes things work, I am the finisher who makes things comfortable. The whole is greater than its parts.

The conclusion I draw from the last 36 years of our work in progress is that success comes from a mutual commitment that begins with a stepping up to an all-in-for-better-or-worse attitude that produces a give and give back in equal measures result. The equal measure thing is a critical element.

However...

If I had to name one single factor that makes it all work even in the worst of days, it would be ... humor.  

Laughter sands down rough edges, breaks the ice, builds bridges over troubled waters. And is the glue that holds it together when it seems like it threatens to fall apart.

A year ago, to commemorate our 35th anniversary, I wrote a song and made a video. Though falling admittedly way short of perfect it represents for me that what is perfectly imperfect can also be referred to as being simply... 

the best... so far.

Love, 

Meema

The Mind Is A Mysterious Thing

 

We are doing a unit on Psychology in our homeschool program. How the brain works, what makes us do what we do, what influences cause us to learn and remember information.

Yesterday we learned about Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation or how we can be both inspired (motivated) to want to learn something by external rewards or be self-directed (Intrinsic Motivation) to learn for no other reason than the love of doing it. 

Which begs the question - which kind of learning nets better results?

One example presented was a clinical test performed on a group of children who loved to play with felt markers. The group was divided and one half were offered small rewards or treats to play with the markers. The other half were left to choose to freely play on their own. After a period of time, the first group were suddenly denied the rewards and, not unpredictably, they quickly lost interest in the markers. The second group, however, continued playing and enjoying the markers with no interruption. 

As is our routine, at the end of a study session, my deep thinker grandson and I do comparative analysis by exchanging personal experiences and POVs. I offered that it had been my lifelong experience that when I love doing something, writing, painting, sewing, creating in general, I can do it with great energy and limitless imagination. However, in those times when I was commissioned to create something in exchange for a payment or wage, I found my creative juices were somehow stifled. I hated the deadline imposed, the boundaries, the commitment to perform to someone else's expectations. In short, I didn't love the activity but did it only or the reward (fee). 

I could also add, in hindsight, those times when I was doing something I loved doing but for an Extrinsic Reward, I can't recall a single time I did it better than I ever did when I was doing it for no other reason than for the joy of doing it.

Then, Deep Thinker contributed his experience. For over a year, at the beginning of the Covid Madness, he became obsessed with learning the piano. He poured himself into it for hours a day and was soon playing complex arrangements like Moonlight Sonata, with amazing skill completely self taught except for a short time when he had a unique opportunity to take lessons via Zoom from a well known singer songwriter. 

Then, one day, he just stopped. Months passed. The piano sat silent.

In our study of the human brain and how it processes, how it stores, how we remember and forget information, what motivates us, we leaned that some memorized skills require ongoing practice. In short, use it or lose it. This might include sports, learning another language and playing a musical instrument. But there has to be some kind of motivation even so. 

Deep Thinker did not admit this to me, but I suspect that when he sat down to the piano last weekend, he was testing his 'memory' of that thing he so loved doing. He said he realized that he quit because it became a chore, a thing that had to be done to 'get better' at it. His joy in doing it was superseded by a vague, no-end-in-sight goal to improve so he didn't love doing it anymore. It was the sheer exhilaration of doing it that got him doing it to begin with. 

And isn't that a classic example of how our strange brains are so easily manipulated into replacing delight in doing with some other extrinsic reward? When it becomes a job, an obligation, a commitment to perform, more often than not it isn't fun anymore. There's an old saying, "It isn't work unless you don't want to do it" so this entire topic does not apply to those who have found their niche, the thing they love to do and actually get paid to do it. But, I have to wonder, would these doers still do what they love, as volunteers, even if they didn't get paid? In other words, the Extrinsic Reward is not what motivates them. 

Inventors, innovators, out of the box thinkers, who are usually artists/creators who find what they do for the love of doing it, (Intrinsic Learning), will always be those who keep us from sinking into the dull numbing condition of monotony.  

The mind is indeed a mysterious thing.

For Him,

Meema

On Being Brave

 

I am at a crossroads. Again. Live long enough and you find you have a healthy collection of such moments.

I've always been able to quietly walk away from situations, individuals, or groups that I recognize as incompatible or with whom I feel I do not belong, particularly and especially because of my unconventional faith. 

Firstly, I question not staying on the chance that by remaining I might be a quiet example or plant a small seed. I think about how Christ was judged and vilified for what the self-righteous who deemed as consorting with sinners. But He didn't break bread with the social outcasts to be one of them. His goal was to minister to them to give them an option to choose a higher state of being. Such a commitment requires a certain amount of leadership though.

Acknowledging that, I sink as I own up to my abysmal history of being heard. I am not a leader, persuader or, in the new vernacular, an influencer, nor have I ever had debate skills. If what I believe is akin to a tiny tinkling bell that gets easily overwhelmed by the noise, I lean towards doing as Christ told His disciples, when you enter a town that refuses to hear, turn and shake the dust off your feet and walk away. I have found sometimes that is the best choice. For me, anyway. In some cases I've had to flee to the safety of loving some people from a distance.

There seems to be a very fine line to discern when choosing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

Thus my current conundrum is: 

It is clear for me that open war has been declared against all and everything that Christianity stands for, so do I speak up, stand and defend, even if I know I will be smacked down and dismissed with a currently popular derogatory label? Or do I just walk away? I certainly have done so on multiple occasions, albeit leaving with no grudge or resentment but instead offering a silent prayer that eyes and hearts will be opened. I usually concede that if my voice was not the one that could be heard that the one whose voice would be should be. 

Or... when I start to overthink I wonder if am I just being a coward? Will I be held accountable for not defending Christ regardless the hot spot it puts me in?

Perhaps that is the biggest question for me at this stage of our current societal decline - determining when to speak and when to remain silent. 

War on Christianity is not new and has most certainly been ongoing for more than 2000 years and many brave, outspoken Christians have died for standing up. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, a Lutheran minister, for his stand against Hitler, was imprisoned for several years and then hanged just days before the Allies took down the Third Reich and freed the prisoners in the concentration death camps in Germany. 

But, of late, in this new era of anything-goes-lawlessness, it seems all the stops have been pulled unlike ever before. Anything and everything that is deemed as being based on Christian life standards have now not only been abandoned, these long proven boundaries are now declared to be anti-social on a global scale and are being summarily outlawed. 

How long before we reach the place where speaking in defense of Christian values will land one in prison? Wait. It's already happening actually. All over the world. Canada. Australia. Perhaps you were unaware that in the UK, street preachers are often arrested for daring to speak out against homosexuality? It's referred to as the crime of committing  'hate speech'.  And, of course, the definition of hate speech is conveniently left fluid and can be reinterpreted to suit the current cultural trends. 

When the day comes that a word or phrase can be designated as a weapon to silence God's people, when/how do we, who continue to hold to God's standards, react? Do we stand and fight, even to death? Or do we fall back and keep our heads down hoping we can survive until normal is restored - by someone else? 

Or do we work under the radar? Do you know how many Christians were rescued covertly from Afghanistan, at great risk, by privately funded groups, after the current administration abandoned them to assured death? Thousands. This is recent history, by the way, not some side note from a long ago war recorded in a short paragraph in a history book. 

Perhaps the answer I seek isn't either/or but rather, if you trust the still small voice and strain to listen for the tinkling bell, you will know what to do when the time comes. And then choose to do it bravely, even if you find yourself on the receiving end of a noose or firing squad. 

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said just before he was hanged, 

"This is the end - for me the beginning of life."

For Him,

Meema

Recommended Reading:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

5100 Christians Rescued