I love the word ‘reboot.’ This is a precious word to ‘refresh’ from a periodic fight with your loved one. Time is right for rebooting to extricate yourself from the bitter after taste of a dissonant exchange where nothing is remaining to solve! Either there is a stagnant irritant issue like a dripping pipe to sort out or there is an unresolvable disagreement stuck like two parallel lines. If you are intimate and in long term relationship, these, I believe, are important times to pay attention! The good thing about arguments and ruffled feathers is you get to know what the other one is really thinking with acrimonious exchanges that open the window into the previously unspoken resentments. There is such a thing as pride that wedges between a fight and a resolution. I tell folk to swallow the pride and embrace the loving past, even to go back as far as the good old dating days. Think not of how nice they were to you then, but how nice you were to them, then! Moreover, reality is you cannot always resolve all disagreements. Allowing respectable boundaries from talking about touchy topics so as to not keep digging into pesky things that press the wrong buttons is obviously the right option. If you are committed to the relationship, why waste time staying stuck?
I always think, if your loved ones are hypothetically 70% good, they are keepers. This is a rough estimate and only you can decide on the 70% rule with deeper thinking, when not caught up in emotional turmoil (This requires more discussion, but I like to keep this simple for now). Otherwise, what I am saying is waste of time if you have the rough end of the deal in life and need to move on. By the way, 70% here does not mean C grade like my teacher friend Dorelle laughs, but a pretty good deal!
Listening to Paul Kalanidhi’s book ‘When Breath Becomes Air’ where he wonders as a Neurosurgeon working on brains was perhaps to fight with death blinking in front of him, I wonder if I chose my life in parallel working with brains to help scoop the best out of life, while breathing. I recognize that to make the most of what you have depends both on the physiology of the brain’s reactivity as well as attitude that you ultimately groom and tame.
Anyway, overall, if things are good, why not get back in tune, and start loving hard? Why not dig deep with empathy? This is so important to not lose, especially when you are irritated or when they need you. It calls for endurance. Everyone has a lot of difficult parts and lot of good parts. Why not think of giving and not getting at the difficult times? Trust me, things will work out, so naturally. Dive in to begin fresh! Refresh. Reboot.
