April is National Poetry Month, so I can’t help myself. Yes, it’s another post about dogs that isn’t really about dogs. Welcome to my world.
Leave It
One of the first commands in dog training:
Come. Sit. Stay. Leave it.
Don’t get off track.
Don’t investigate it or nudge it
or taste it or tinker with it.
Leave it.
Can I leave it? No, I can’t.
I must circle it, watch it,
hold it in a freezing stare,
dare it to jump.
Leave it.
I must cajole it, entertain it,
dance around it, convince it to like me.
Leave it.
I must adjust it, improve it,
make my point louder,
make sure I’m understood.
Leave it.
If I don’t leave it,
I won’t get any further than where it sits.
There is such a thing as good enough.
There has to be because we are imperfect.
There are reasons, better reasons,
to put it down.
Log out.
Take a walk.
Look up.
It’s not going anywhere, but you are.
Leave it.
You can do it. So can I.
Let’s try together.
Now.
Leave it.
My man is a bit of a messy. Not filthy, rather blissfully cluttered and unaware.
I asked his parents prenuptually, as we searched for an empty spot to sit in his living room, if he’d always been like this.
“Yeah, pretty much,” said my future father-in-law. Then he looked at me, a glint in his eye, and said, “You know he’s not going to change.”
Without hesitation I said, “Neither am I.”
Smug in my neatness, I relayed this story to my husband all these years later.
“Oh, really?” he said. “That’s funny, because around that same time your brother pulled me aside and told me you’re a perfectionist.”
What? My brother knows I’m a perfectionist?
“Yeah, he said, ‘You know she’s going to want everything to be perfect.’ I think he wanted to prepare me and protect you,” said my husband.
A perfectionist? My brother told my fiancé I’m a perfectionist? How did he know? Who told him?
Perfectionism is akin to chicken pox. And messiness. Can’t be hidden really. That’s its main imperfection.
I like to think my perfectionistic tendancies have mellowed with the years. Same way my husband likes to think his messiness has. I like to imagine my Myers-Briggs Super Feeler personality has no qualms with my Super Thinker husband. My J and his P can live together peacefully.
Seems truer though, our greatest strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin.
The optimism that so attracts me to him drives me to the brink when it runs up against my realism. My emotion that so touches his heart often leaves him flailing alone in his logic.
How do we survive? Somehow we work it out. Temper one another. Genuinely like one another. Struggle and fight to love. Pick up day after day and maintain a disciplined loop, a quiet repeat of what works, a layering of commitment and time as circumstances spiral up and down.
Where I bring organization, he brings spontenaeity. Where I bring order, he brings fullness. Where I am prone to panic, he is even-keeled. Where he is tempted to inaction, I hold ground and press on.
Not sure how it works, messy and imperfect though it may be, but thank God by His grace it does.
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8 NIV
we three
You Take Me the Way I Am by Ingrid Michaelson is one of the sweetest songs ever. Some people don’t like the video. Must be the clowns. Normally I don’t like clowns, but I do like this video. Reminds me of a certain married couple I know.
