My husband and I go about doing a lot of things, in two entirely different ways. My husband is methodical and analytical. I am intuitive and impulsive and impatient. He tends to do things more slowly and thoughtfully than me. My motto is “Get ‘er done fast, hope for the best, and we’re strong enough, and smart enough, to be able to deal with any related fallout.” My husband’s motto is “Get it done right the first time, no matter how long and boring of a process it takes.” We have made peace with each other’s differences . . . . for the most part. We get each other. We are yin and yang. On the rare times that we have been at the grocery store together, I toss things into the shopping cart with no rhyme or reason, until my cart looks the the Grinch’s overfilled sleigh, and he halts the whole production, to organize the food in the cart, like he was packing it with the precision of a nuclear engineer, avoiding detonation. When picking restaurants, my husband likes to study Yelp, with careful consideration of each and every review. My method is more, “Let’s just wing it, and stop at the next place that looks cute.”
Neither way is “right or wrong.” We have had amazing successes and utter failures, using both methodologies, going about our business. I distinctly remember sitting in a restaurant that we had picked using my “looks cute method” and my husband reading the Yelp reviews (after we had ordered our food) about how many people had been hospitalized with food poisoning after eating there. Overall though, when my husband and I work together, taking in consideration our mutual love and admiration for each other, making room for both of our ways to meld into one shared familial life, it has worked out happily and successfully, for both of us. This fact, is a good reminder for me right now, living in a world that feels like it is in such disillusioning disarray. So many of us are craving certainty right now. We are all craving the “the right answers” and “the right way” to fix everything, right now. We have to remain hopeful and optimistic and open-minded that there may be many effective processes to get us back to balance, and we have to have faith in one another, that while going at solutions differently, most of us want the same things. We all want a sense of security, a feeling of belonging and the confidence of mattering. If we make it our collective purpose for all of us to have the ability to achieve these important feelings for each of ourselves, how we get there, to this collective peace and balance, won’t be nearly as important as the end results.
