Monday, April 7, 2008

Being Right Or Possessing Love

The title sort of says it all, doesn’t it?

Tomorrow I am starting on my funky title escapade, but today I wanted to touch on something that I was mauling over last week on a rare night when I got to leave at 5 pm and go the park and watch the dogs and the gulls tease each other.

Is it more important to you to be right? Or is it more important to you to possess your love?
I have met many opinionated people in my life, some here, some in Ohio, some in Missouri. I have met opinionated people who can manage to keep their opinions to themselves in terms that the whole world doesn’t have to agree with them and they are still in one piece, and then there are opinionated people who have to have the rest of the world agree with them or the rest of the world just BLOWS, ya know it? More than once I have slipped into category two, but my goal has been to be in the first group—a strong woman in the place of not needing anyone else’s assurances that I am right.

I normally wouldn’t argue my rightness, but there are other opinionated people who demand to know why you would have such a jacked-up version of reality that they demand your reasoning, and then they talk you out of what you know, until at the end of the conversation the gut instinct you had wasn’t so bad after all. You look back at the person who gave you such a hard time for your opinion and something chips away.

At what point, then, do you take the being right over the relationship with that person who not only doesn’t understand your reality but demands that you change yours so that THEY are right? We all try to be helpful, I know, but isn’t there a point where we cherish the other person enough to let them talk out what they need to talk out and listen to them for aspects of what might help us too?

I must be in my own Disneyland, or with God, or not shocked at all to be so alone. It’s not so much that I am always right. But I AM right once or twice a year and when I am I have lost someone for it. Or, they have lost me for never getting the opportunity to be right.

1 comment:

dkearns72 said...

The fate of contemporary life with cultural and worldview fissions all the way down to the everyday relationship. Fusion and agreement.... I so miss them too.