full fathom five

Degrees of listening

   I never used to be a good listener because I was too busy seeing people as audience, trying to capture and hold their attention with humor or stories.  I think I learned this early, from my mother, who liked to collect stories about people who were "characters," and entertain her friends with funny imitations of them.  I grew up assuming that getting together with people meant entertaining them.

    Now, here in late middle-age, I 've finally learned that most people appreciate listeners more than entertainers, and I've gradually come to talk less and listen more.  And find it much more interesting! 

     In the process, I've noticed different degrees of listening.  There are some people who don't seem to listen at all, who are just ON, performing all the time.  Remembering back to when I was that way, I recall being nervous, insecure, feeling pressured, as if I had to earn points by amusing everyone.  So I now feel sorry for the entertainers and I've noticed something curious as I listen to them: I often recognize my own words from earlier conversations coming back at me, like an echo-chamber.  (I'm chagrined to say that I can't resist telling them, "Yeah, I told you that.")  This is disconcerting, because it suggests that these people don't remember our times together.  And that makes sense, because if you don't listen most of the time, you won't remember who said what.  

    The other day I was walking with an acquaintance, and I realized that she was listening to just enough of my sentence for something that related to her, and then she'd jump in, interrupting.  I'd be saying something like "I'm going to put a garden in our back field today," but at "garden" she'd be off and running with an elaborate story of woodchucks and slugs decimating her hostas.  

   The above two degrees: hardly listening at all, and listening just till the mention of a common interest, are people that I've learned to minimize contact with.  People at the other end of the scale, the listeners, I try to cultivate.  

     And thus I learned a lot from my friend T., who died recently.  As has happened so much since middle-age, when I began losing relatives and friends to chronic illness, heart attack, or old age, I didn't know how much T. had influenced me until she was gone.  After death, in a person's wake, you can finally - with the ending of their story - see their real character.  And so T.'s perennial self-doubt, her tendency to see herself as less than she was, had always seemed like a weakness to me when she was alive.  But after she died, I realized that it was this self-doubt that made T. one of the best listeners I've ever known.  She listened with full attention, patience, and compassion, because she truly believed that whomever was talking was more important than she was.  She thus always put others before her, and at her memorial service the cars of friends kept coming and coming, filling up the big mowed meadow behind their barn, and spilling out to the driveway and road.  What I had seen as a weakness, was actually a strength, an asset that attracted people to her. 

     I'm not as good a listener as T. was, but at least I do it enough now to know that it's the only path to doing it better.  And being a better friend as a result.

Post-Memorial Day Reflections

I had two Memorial Day services to attend this year, and in whizzing up the Maine Turnpike from the first one in New Hampshire to the second one - the first such service our little rural town has put on - I got a speeding ticket.  It's a whopping big fine (over $200), which I'm going to contest based on my perfect driving record and years of community service.  Well, at least I can try.

But after the New Hampshire service, I found myself reluctant to pull myself away from the typical reunion-like reminiscence that always takes place when adult children of lost submariners get together around our explicit commonality.  It's rare when complete strangers talk so intimately from the get-go, and we tend to overlook the fact that we've never met before, and the talk explodes with revelations. There's no chit-chat.  Talk's stripped down to urgent stories that we've got to get out before we run off to other services or family events.   

And so A., a lady whose dad went down on the WWII submarine Albacore, told me about the smell of stewed tomatoes, while her partner peeled off from us in search of normal conversation.  A. fit what I've come to recognize as the paradigm of adults who lost their dads early in life: they don't start researching their dads till some event cracks them open in middle-age.  A's event was the sound of an old-time kid's bicycle bell, which - when she looked into it, she found was the signal of the WWII telegram delivery man when he brought wives the terrible news that their husbands' boats were overdue and presumed lost. 

When A. heard the bicycle bell that put her on the trail of her father, she was 47.  Some kids were going by on the sidewalk outside her house, the bell sounded, and the portals of memory opened up like a powerful sixty-year-old wind blowing through her head. A bedroom in her grandparents' house; her mother crying; sitting on a yellow and white quilt on the bed; the smell of stewed tomatoes.

A. called up her mother and said that she had some questions about her childhood, but wanted her mother to first just listen to her version so that she - A. - could know if she was remembering right. After listening, her mother confirmed the memory: it was the day the telegram had come, when A. was just five.  Like many wives with small children, A.'s mother and A. were living with A.'s grandparents while A.'s father was at sea.  The grandparents had been canning tomatoes in the kitchen when A. and her mom heard the telegraph man's delivery bell from their upstairs bedroom. 

Another urgent outpouring was from L., who told us how she was only just now realizing the traits she had inherited from her dad, who went down on the submarine Thresher.  She mentioned all the volunteer work she does, and we agreed that many of us carry (suffer, in my case; I hate committee-work) that strong sense of civic duty that our fathers had to have to serve in submarines.  She also talked about how calm she is in a crisis, and we reflected on how this trait had to have come from her father; prospective submariners were screened for their ability to suppress the natural reaction of fight or flight in emergencies, and keep quiet as well as calm.  I had a sudden flashback to thirty-some years ago when I'd been stacking firewood in our driveway, and the woodpile collapsed on my hand, crushing a finger.  A praeternatural calm came over me as I quietly told our six year-old daughter to run inside and call Dad to come home right away from work.  She'd seen the blood and knew it was an emergency, but was able to dial the correct number right away and calmly ask for her father.  We got to the hospital and had the hand numbed and stitched up without incident, and I'd always thought - till this Memorial Day - that it was for our daughter's sake that I had stifled all my natural crisis-responses.  I'd thought it was something that all mothers with young kids have.  I'm lucky enough not to have had more occasions to test this belief in the years since.

I have another WWII orphan friend who figured out late in life that the recurrent nightmare she's had ever since she was a child likely stemmed from that fateful day when her mother received the "overdue, presumed lost" telegram.  I've written about it here before so I'll just summarize:  D. would wake up in a sweat after dreaming of being suffocated, with a woman's scream in the background.  She took a roadtrip in her late fifties with her aged mother to all the significant places her mom had been with her dad.  The trip revived her mother's fifty year-old memories, and she told D. that on the terrible day, D.'s paternal grandmother answered the door, read the telegram and started screaming.  D.'s mother, upstairs, grabbed baby D. out of her crib and ran downstairs.  When she saw D.'s grandmother with the telegram, she knew.  D.'s grandmother stopped screaming enough to help the telegram man, still in the door, to pry D.'s mother's fingers from the baby, who was turning blue as her mother, in a daze of grief, desperately clutched her against her chest.

This is what Memorial Day, blessedly, has turned into since I woke up in middle-age and went on the trail of my father.     

   

          

    

Buying a Car

I recently traded in my '99 Honda CRV, with 124,000 miles on it and expensive repairs in its near future, for a new Honda Civic hybrid.  Living way out here in the sticks as we do, I was looking for ways to reduce our carbon-output from all the driving we do to get to services and jobs.  I've been tracking mileage of the new car, and I'm getting 41 mpg., as opposed to the 25 on the old car.  So I'm very happy.   

    However, the buying experience itself left a bad taste in my mouth.  I crumpled to the sales pitch, buying the car from the first dealership I visited, rather than sticking to my plan of visiting the two other dealerships in the area to compare prices.  Wanting to be happy with the process, I was honest, telling them my plan.  The salesman said "What'll it take to get you to stay here and buy from us?"  I shrugged my shoulders.  He put up a finger and ran over to his sales manager.  When he came back, he said "What if my sales manager can prove to you that ours is the lowest price?  Would you buy then?"   

    "Yes," I said, "but how can he do that?" 

    "I don't know, but it'll just take a few minutes."   He ran back over and stood by while the sales manager printed out something on his computer.  When he brought it back, it was new car pricing from the National Honda website, plus bluebook pricing for different conditions of trade-in.  I'd checked out these same documents myself on the web just that morning, but the salesman tailored them to my situation by showing me what condition they judged my CRV to be in (fair rather than the good I'd given it), and what most dealers paid on average for the 2007 Civic Hybrid.   

    I told him that these documents were available to anyone on the web, and they weren't really proof of what specific dealers would do for me.  The salesman said, "Well, it's up to you; if you want to save yourself the time of visiting all the other dealers, these are ballpark figures."   

    I thought about it, then reluctantly caved.  I knew I was just taking his word for it, and - worse - swerving off the only course that would give me certainty.  But what made me "roll-over" was not a simple calculation of how much time I could save by ending the process now.  It was all that went before: the smooth use of reciprocity ("We don't normally let our customers go on test-drives without taking a xerox of their driver's license" - I'd left mine on my desk that morning(!) - "but for you, we'll do it") arousing my sense that I owed them similar favors or niceties; eliciting prior agreement ("If my sales manager can prove blah blah blah, will you buy this car?") so that I didn't want to go back on my word; and subtle time-pressure ("We know your time is valuable, so we'll go over this paperwork fast"), so that I was reluctant to say, "Wait a minute; give me some time alone with this invoice, so I can check the figures."   

    What all this comes down to, is politeness.  It's hard to tell someone you want to go off to a corner to check their paperwork  - because it suggests you don't trust them.  And a strong sense of reciprocity, the conditioning that we should do unto others ... is deeply ingrained in us.  It's especially hard to suspend in those of us who only make big purchases like cars every ten years or so.  For people who buy and sell things every day, the rules of politeness are more manipulable, elastic.   

    So next time I buy anything whose price is negotiable, I'll review negotiation tools before I meet with salespeople. But meanwhile, I have a car whose performance and gas-savings are well worth a slight wistfulness about not shopping around.        

    

Not a bomb

A., the Afghan refugee whom I've been tutoring through Literacy Volunteers for the last three years, is going through a run of bad luck.  His car - the second 150,000+ mile junker he's had in the two years he's had his U.S. driver's license - died on the road last week in the middle of traffic.  A. was so "depressed" as he stood on the shoulder with a policeman, he couldn't even remember the phone number of his supervisor at the hospital, a number he uses "fifty times a day" on the job, so he could ask the cop to please call to tell them he'd be late to work.   He then had to pay $300 for towing and a mechanic's opinion that the car would cost $1750 to fix. So now he's looking for a new used car and walking to and from work. 

   The owner of A.'s apartment got laid off from his job and has to sell his place.  So A. has been told he has to leave by this weekend, five days before his rental time is officially up.  I told him that's not legal, that he could protest the order, but he says he doesn't want to because the owner "is sick." A. gestured at his body, "Not physically, but mental."  A.'s always liked the owner because he's never counted the cash A. gives him for rent the first of each month; he simply takes and pockets it, which A. takes as a sign of trust.  And as a former physician in the Ukraine and Afghanistan, A. has a soft spot for anyone he deems "sick."   

   So A.'s been looking for a new room or apartment and a new car while holding down his fulltime job as a nightshift phlebotomist in the local hospital.  As someone who sends most of his money home to his elderly mother in Afghanistan ("she have no electricity, no running water, no insurance; only insurance is her children"), one of the few indulgences he's bought for himself here in the U.S. is a "flower with sides."  I gather it's a potted plant.  He had to get all his things out of his place the other day, and his soon-to-be-ex landlord owner helped him take them to storage in a borrowed truck.  All A. was left with for his last day in his apartment was his backpack with a change of clothes, his wallet, a borrowed bike, and the "flower with sides."  Since he couldn't ride that around with him on the bike, he carried it outside to the back yard and put it in the crotch of an old tree, up off the ground and seemingly safe till he got a car and could come back for it. "Nature turn back to nature," he said. As he was turning from the tree, a big burly man came hurrying across the yard toward him, demanding to know what he was doing.  A.'s had this happen before, people stopping him whenever he does anything out of the ordinary - like running up the stairwell rather than taking the elevator to get to work on time, or walking home after the night shift in a snowstorm when his car's broken down too late at night to get help.  He knows that people look at him then and think "terrorist," so he met the man in his backyard with a calm smile, explaining that he had to move, but was trying to save his plant.  He knew by the way the man's eyebrows rose when he showed him "the flower with sides" in the crotch of the tree, that the guy probably thought he'd been planting a bomb.   

   As I listened, I made a mental note to ask A. at the end of our session where the plant was so that I could get it on my way home and keep it for him.  But then A. took some documents out of his backpack, and everything else flew from my mind.  He showed me a letter of rejection for his application to take the first of four all-day medical exams to be eligible to re-do his residency in order to be licensed to practice medicine in the U.S.  The application fee was $695, and we've been working towards this for three years.  We spent the next hour poring over the twenty-four-page document to try to find our error.  We finally concluded that the translation service we'd employed to translate A.'s birth-certificate from Pashtu to English, hadn't identified itself as "official" by its letterhead as specified by the 70-page instruction-booklet accompanying the application, and so I've got to write a letter to the translation service before I go on vacation, attaching documents, etc. and asking them to redo the job. 

   The only thing I could think as I left A. yesterday, was that while I'm away for the next few weeks, nothing worse could happen to him.  At least that's what I hoped as I drove through Portland, having long forgotten about the plant in a tree somewhere in one of the many backyards I passed.               

North Pownal Think Tank

We live in a rural community of artists, craftsmen, farmers and gardeners, all united by our love of nature.  We have more than our share of eccentrics, drawn to a setting where they can go for weeks without seeing another human if they choose.   

About a mile up the road is one of our town's two stores, a little grocery store with an old-fashioned lunch-counter.  They serve greasy breakfasts and lunches on styrofoam plates with plastic utensils, not a great place to eat.  But a loyal group of retired and self-employed men hang out there, nursing cups of coffee all through the morning and into the afternoon. 

Recently, the store had a change of ownership, and the new owners got tired of the men staying for hours and taking up all the room at the lunch-counter, without buying anything more than coffee.  So, rather than having an awkward confrontation, the store owners simply closed down the lunch counter, limiting the store to groceries and take-out coffee and ice cream.

The next thing my husband and I and the other exercisers who walk, jog, and bike past the country store each morning knew, the ousted coffee-klatch men were up on ladders across the street from the store framing, hammering, and shingling this little gazebo, below.  They built it all from materials they salvaged from the local dump, putting it on skidders so it'll be taxed as a mobile building, thus at a lower rate than a permanent structure.  When I asked Allen B., the local woodturner whose property it's on, if it was an ice-fishing shack, he said No, they'd thought of that, but there isn't a body of water underneath it. 

When the group finished it, they moved in a table and chairs, which take up the entire space, and a little gas-heater.  They put up a sign, christening it the "North Pownal Think Tank."  Now they get their coffee take-out from the country store, and bring it to their little clubhouse, where they can hang out to their heart's content.  On good days, they sit outside and survey the corner's comings and goings beneath the yellow and red maples.  You can see their outdoor chairs stacked to the left of the building, below.

The coffee-klatch guys have always been a powerful political bloc in our town.  They have more time and unity than most to hatch and carry out plans about who should run for town Selectboard and other official positions.  And now that they have a private rather than public meeting space, I imagine they'll be a more forceful voice than ever among our 1500 residents. 

Change

A friend said the other day, when I was venting about a 68 year-old relative who won't get what seems like depression checked out by a doctor, "Don't you think that after a certain age, people can't change?" 

This friend has made different versions of this remark so many times over the years I've known her that I've stopped even trying to disabuse her of the notion.  When she first said it way back when, I said that while what she says may well be true, I'm choose to believe it isn't, as a modus operandi, because I don't want to think we're limited that way.  I want to think that humans can change at any age.

Thinking the opposite is - to me - thinking like a victim.  It gives you no choice, no control over your behavior. Age is the determiner of all, period.  I realize that this belief, that one has no choice, serves some people.  This is what they want to feel: hemmed in, even paralyzed.

But all we have to do is go over to Ronni Bennett's weblog, at Time Goes By http://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/ to see that people can change at any age.  Ronni, at 64, is leaving her longtime home and striking out for who-knows-where.  She's calmly going about her business, proving that the most drastic change - giving up one's beloved home, community, friends, and longtime lifestyle - is possible at any age.   

When memory begins

Now that we're nearing Memorial Day, I find myself thinking of last year at this time.  I'm in an organization of people (American WWII Orphans Network or AWON) who lost fathers in WWII, so Memorial Day is a significant marker for us.  We had our most recent conference last Memorial Day at the dedication of the WWII Memorial in Wash. D.C.  During one session, we divided into "sharing circles," small groups to discuss the effects of losing our dads.

One woman, my roommate D., told a fascinating story.  She talked about a recurring nightmare she's had of a bloodcurdling female scream that seems to go on forever, and when it finally stops she feels like something is crushing her chest and she can't breath or cry out for help.  She's been awakened by this nightmare all her life, and puzzled over it because as far as she knows, she's never heard a scream like that.  She was brought up Quaker, in a quiet, peaceful community, and never went to violent movies. 

D. never told anyone about this dream until five years ago, when she took her aged mother on a trip to revisit some old haunts of her mom and dad's before he went off to war. This pilgrimage loosened D.'s mother's tongue, and she told D. about the moment during the war that she got the dreaded news that her husband had fallen at the Battle of the Bulge.  D. was only seven or eight weeks old at the time, and she and her mother were living with her father's mother.  D.'s mother was upstairs rocking her infant daughter when she heard her mother-in-law answer the doorbell downstairs.  There then came a high-pitched, bloodcurdling scream; D.'s mother clutched D. to her chest and ran downstairs to see her mother-in-law doubled over in grief with a man who had delivered the telegram of her son's death. The young mother looked down and realized that she was clutching her baby so tight that D. was turning blue. 

After the mother told her this story in 2000 on their car-trip, D. told her about her recurring nightmare, then asked if it was possible that she could have formed an unconscious memory of that event at only six weeks old.  Her mother, a well-educated woman who had taken many child-development classes in college, said nonetheless that she didn't know.  But D. told our AWON group in Washington last year that after telling her mother about it, she hasn't had the nightmare since.

To me, this shows the power of catharsis, of telling your story, at the very least (which is why we do this at AWON conferences).  But I would like to know if there are any psychologists out there who know if the memories of infants are developed enough to record and subconsciously link danger-signals like a scream and near-suffocation for the rest of their lives.  From the little experience I've had of babies, it certainly seems possible.  When our daughter was only about nine-months old, I let her off at daycare one morning and she twisted away from the daycare woman at the door and glommed onto my neck, screaming.  I tried to calm her and couldn't, so took her back to the car and home.  Later that day, when bathing her, I found a huge bruise covering her bottom.  I called the daycare woman, a Jehovah's Witness who believed in spanking (yeah yeah, I should have known better), who apologized and said that one of her workers had mistaken the thin daytime diaper that my daughter was wearing, for a thick nighttime one when she spanked her, and don't worry, if she regularly let that go on, she'd have been out of business long ago.  I complained, and never took my daughter back there.

I learned from the incident that infants have at least short-term memory and keen antennae for danger as well as the ability to associate things (the sight of the daycare operator at the door) with past hurt.  I don't know if any vestige of the incident lasted in my daughter's memory, but the experience tilts me to believing that D.'s early experience was the source of the lifelong nightmare. 

Is there anyone out there who knows the research on infant memory, or has had similar experience, and could comment?            

Living in boxes

A friend who lives in New Hampshire got me thinking about the boxes we carry around in our heads.  She told me about her neighbor coming to her and asking her to please not cross his property line.  They live in the country, surrounded by miles of fields and woods.  My friend's husband, thinking he was neatening up the place, had regularly mowed a few feet over the neighbor's property-line to a natural boundary of trees when he cut the meadow each August.  And my friends had always walked through the woods behind both houses, never thinking about the property lines they crossed. 

The neighbor was very nice, explaining that he'd grown up in a big city where his family and others of Italian descent were always scrapping with the Irish immigrants in their run-down neighborhood.  Everyone had fences around their small, boxy yards, and although kids ran around freely, the adults never crossed each other's property lines.  Boundaries were sacred - signs of respect as well as ownership.

My friend, steeped in Buddhism, immediately apologized to her neighbor, realizing that her suburban childhood had been blessed with enough open space and ethnic homogeneity that people didn't have to think about territories and defending them.  She asked the neighbor to help her, when the snow melted, mark their common border with stakes and string; she and her husband would keep strictly to their side from now on, letting the meadow and eventual saplings grow up on the neighbor's side to thicken the natural boundary of trees.

This quick accommodation was because the neighbor was smart and trusting enough to tell my friend literally where he was coming from. He was showing her the boxes he carries around in his head: my turf and yours.  My friend knows that we all have boxes in our heads, places we file things as good or bad. She sees her daily meditation practice as an attempt to get rid of these boxes, because they separate us from others.

I was driving someplace the other day and heard an ad on the radio for a local firm: "We have a passion for accounting," it said.  I thought it was funny, in the same way a want-ad asking for "Creative Accountant" in the newspaper some years ago was funny.  But these are only amusing because I throw accountants into a box labelled "Dull and plodding."  Two of my most humble friends are doctors, and I realize that I'm amazed and impressed by their humility because I've always thrown doctors into a box labelled "Arrogant and entitled."

My daughter, an attorney, just got new business cards with a shark on the back, pre-empting the box many of us put lawyers in.  Does anyone have any other pre-emptions or tricks to wake us up to how we box up our worlds?

        

   

    

Bean suppers

I mentioned in an earlier post how we're lucky to have a bonafide Buddhist monk living down the road.  Three mornings a week I go to his six a.m. meditation session.  Afterwards, the group of us chats for a few minutes on the way out.

Today, for some reason, we got to talking about our local bean suppers.  The two established churches in town - the Congregationalists and Methodists - hold them as fundraisers every weekend in warm weather.  Our group was talking about how the suppers have evolved from social events into money-makers. 

My husband and I have only gone to a couple of these since we moved here eleven years ago.  So I don't know what they were before, but the emphasis certainly seems to be strictly business now.   

We were turned away from the first one we tried to go to, after waiting in a long line outside the church.  Someone came out and announced that all the seating for the first shift was taken, but that we could wait twenty minutes and maybe get a seat on the next shift.  I went to the administrator and told him I'd called ahead for reservations and that those people had told me that they don't take them, but that we'd have no problem if we got here in time.  "But..." I turned and gestured at the long line.  The administrator took me aside and wrote down a phone number.  "Call this guy," he said.  "We don't take reservations, but we like to have names for seatings."

So my husband and I and the other couple we were with went off to a restaurant for dinner.  But the next week, I called the new phone number and left our names for the early seating.  I'd been told to go early for the best choice of pies.

This time, we got in by simply bypassing the long line and walking in the door to the lady with the cash-box and giving her our name, a procedure that must have gone on last week but was so casual we didn't notice. Getting the phone number, which is a private residence unaffiliated with the church, was the crucial key.

Everyone sat at long folding tables and aluminum folding chairs, closely packed into the church's low-ceilinged, painted-cement basement.  It smelled of concrete and beans.  I greeted our table-mates and introduced ourselves, but they just gave quick hello's or nods, then eyes to the beans. This was made for taciturn New Englanders: beans, cole slaw, cornbread, kool-ade, pie, coffee, half hour to eat, then scrape back your chair for the next shift.

It works.  The lines outside the churches are longer every year.  And I have friends who actually check out the newspapers of towns throughout Southern Maine, driving miles to try out a new bean supper.  They know who's good for salads, whose beans have meat in them, and who has the best pies.  They love the anonymity; they go there to fill up and drive home early enough to discover a new back road or see a deer.

So it's all in the way you look at it.  If you still expect the social event of old, you'll be disappointed.  If you look at it as what it's evolved into: a great fundraiser for the church (it's all donated food and, of course, labor) and a lowcost way of "going out" to eat, it's a sure winner.

And that was the Buddhist lesson for this morning.                  

Florida Weekend II

The reason I didn't remember that my hostess this past weekend is legally blind, after knowing her for eight or nine years, is because of the context in which I know her: our Marriage Encounter group.  My husband (W.) and I are one of five couples who've been meeting monthly as a followup to the Marriage Encounter weekends we all went through almost a decade ago.  Marriage Encounter is a worldwide organization that was started by a church - I think by the Catholics in the Fifties - to support marriage.  It does this by holding weekend gatherings where couples go and learn methods of communicating with each other, using open-ended questions (that can't be answered with yes/no), active listening, and writing letters to each other addressing a shared question.  You're supposed to use these methods regularly after the weekend, integrating this "dialoguing" into your life on a daily basis.  Couples who led the weekend vouched for this daily practice, and their testimony was authentic enough to overcome W.'s and my skepticism about other aspects of the weekend, which - as the only non-religious couple in a gathering headed by a Catholic priest who wrote letters to Jesus in lieu of a wife - was considerable.  W. and I don't dialogue daily or even weekly, but we do meet with this monthly group, which is the only venue we've found to learn how other couples handle issues that come up in every marriage, and to tease out and support what works.  An example of a Marriage Encounter tenet that works whenever you get mad at your spouse, regret or romanticize roads not taken, or even consider shedding all baggage and going off on your own, is "love is a decision."  If you're lucky enough to believe this, you know the relationship is at least partially under your cognitive control.  It's not a mystery or a hidden, subconscious force. You can then - in the next minute or hour or day - decide again to love the life and spouse you have over all the unknowns and might-have-beens.

In our monthly meetings, through open-ended questions that the hosting couple writes up, we dialogue about issues ranging from "How do we control our money?" or "How do we handle our in-laws?" to "How do we behave towards each other when we feel overwhelmed?"

Perhaps because our emphasis is on celebrating and supporting our marriages, there is very little complaining in our group.  That's why I'd all but forgotten that my hostess of last weekend is legally blind.  Members who have chronic health problems or even worse, don't focus on specifics, but find some global aspect of their situation we all can share, such as trying to find ways of being more independent, putting less burden on spouses, etc. 

When we first joined this group, with my sixties bias of "letting it all hang out," I distrusted this emphasis on the positive, thinking people were avoiding or denying problems.  But over the years, I'm learning that marriages aren't stories; they don't need conflict to make them interesting or remarkable.  And I'm also learning that focusing on problems makes them grow, at least in my mind, and that there's a way to let them go by that isn't the same as denying that they exist.  So I'm appreciating the celebratory aspect of our group's meetings more.  In this way, the group has hoisted me above my usual cynical and skeptical stance, at least for the duration of our meetings, and I'm grateful.