60% Compatibility, 40% Compromise

I recently read in Cosmopolitan magazine that most people are only 60% compatible with other people, namely, their significant other.  Thanks Cosmo, so much for the concept of soul mates.....

First of all, I would be interested to meet the scientist or statistician who decided that you could quantify compatibility.  I think that's weird.  Second of all, once I got past the fact that this statistic was a pretty pessimistic way of looking at relationships in general, I decided that said weird, pessimistic statistician was probably right.  I'm fully aware that I am NOT a relationship expert.  I am definitely no Dr. Phil (although I have my doubts about his expertise, too).  However, I think I have enough experience to agree that relationships are 60% compatibility and 40% compromise.  

About eight months ago, I ended a long relationship with a guy I had dated since high school.  He was (and still is) an awesome person.  What was great about him was that not only were we dating, but he was also an excellent friend.  I can honestly say that for probably the most impressionable six years of my life, he was my best friend.  However, we may have been 60% compatible, but I was not willing to make some of the compromises that the relationship, ultimately, would have required.  I'm pretty sure relationships begin and end in the 40%.  

Since that breakup, I've had the opportunity to really "date" in the casual sense for the first time.  The thing is, I got to a place where  I didn't want to compromise.  I had a set of standards, and I was banking on the idea that there had to be another human being with that same set of standards.  Maybe there is.  However, I am less and less sure about that, and more and more sure that the compromising is necessary.  Now, I just think you have to find that person for whom you're willing to compromise.  When I say compromise, I don't mean change your core value or beliefs or any of those things that are intrinsic to your character.  For example, I would consider myself very open-minded in many ways, and I have a pretty broad and varied group of friends.  I dated a guy for a little while who was extremely close-minded and, I would venture to say, a tab bit judgmental.  Fun guy.  I liked him; I just could not imagine myself introducing him to my friends.  Deal breaker.  By compromise, what I mean is that, we have to develop a certain level of patience for other people's eccentricities.  Everyone has their hangups and habits, and to make a relationship work, one has to ultimately find the hangups and habits of their significant other endearing.  

Maybe the reason we're only 60% compatible is that nobody's perfect.  I know I'm not.  I'm pretty positive it's going to take a saint to find my sass and and hangups and habits endearing.  For now, I'm pretty optimistic about that person's existence.  Guess we'll just leave it at that.  

Sacrifices

Lent. The season of sacrifice. Forty days to give something up for God. As a girl who grew up Catholic and attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school, the purpose and meaning of Lent has been drilled into me for quite some time now. I kind of viewed it as a "Jesus suffered and now it's your turn" time of year. When I was a kid, I don't think I quite understood exactly what I was doing every Lent when I gave up candy or Cokes, knowing that in forty days I would binge on whatever it was I sacrificed the minute Easter rolled around. Then, as I got older, I started to view Lent as more of a "New Year's Resolution" opportunity. Give up something I know is bad for me and try to keep it up. Hence, I still gave up sweets or Diet Coke. One year I even gave up processed food (a MUCH harder, and more expensive, undertaking than one might imagine).

However, this year I was having a hard time deciding what I wanted to do for Lent. The idea of sacrifice is such a negative one. It denotes pain and suffering and unhappiness. I mean, come on, Jesus' sacrifice involved DYING. But this morning during my daily "browse the Internet for news/check Facebook" time I ran across this quote about sacrifice:

“The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him.” Mahatma Gandhi

Smart guy, that Gandhi. For some reason, this little snippet gave me so much clarity on the meaning of Lent. Sacrifice is an opportunity to fine tune our lives. It opens up the door for a greater happiness. Jesus suffered and sacrificed a LOT, but then he got to spend eternity in Heaven and save humanity. I'd say that's a pretty awesome "peace and joy" payoff. I am almost positive I will not be saving humanity any time during the next forty days, but I think I can find a little peace and joy myself. When I started reading Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project in January, I discovered that she, too, saw the value in making sacrifices in the name of greater clarity. Whether it was a sacrifice of time, by adding something to her life, or a sacrifice of a longheld belief, her sacrifices brought her peace and joy. My little "happiness project" resolutions have fallen to the wayside recently, so that is definitely something I'll be picking back up this Lent. I still haven't decided exactly what I'm giving up, but I am happy to say that I now, for maybe the first time, feel like I have more of an understanding of exactly why I'm giving it up. And I would say that's a very positive first step.

Update on the "Give and Take"

In less than 24 hours, I have already found several ways to be a "giver."  I am SUPER excited about this quick progress, and I promised to be a better blogger, hence a new entry MUCH sooner than normal.  Granted, some of these things have started to become habit and routine, but I am thrilled to report that I gave myself all kinds of reasons to be happy this morning.

• I woke up at 7 am and visited the gym
• I had coffee with a long, lost friend, who I have missed dearly over the past few months
• I was nice to the rude person in the Starbucks line behind me 
• I treated myself to a massage on the spur of the moment.  Spontaneity is not my strong point and making time for frivolous treats like this isn't either, so I was proud of this snap decision 

So there you are.  Four reasons why this day has been fantastic.  The thing is, now I just have to try and keep it up. We'll see how long the giving lasts....

Give and Take

My last post was titled "Patience is a Virtue."  Congratulations to anyone who reads this blog.  You are officially virtuous, seeing as you've had to wait an entire month for a new blog entry.  However, I am promising (once again) that I will be more consistent.  That is finally starting to look like more of a possibility with my life reaching a more even keel and a more normal pace.  By normal, of course, I mean my version of normal, which includes having three jobs.  I believe "normal" to be a sliding scale.  Everybody's is just a little different.  Anyway, in spite of my lack of commitment to the blog, I have made what I think are great strides toward grownup-hood in the past month.

• I attended a teacher's fair and filled out ten different district applications in hopes of finding my dream teaching position.
• I got my first interview (YAY!!)
• I bought cute, yet professional, teacher clothes for teacher's fair and interview mentioned above.  
• I started waking up at 5:30 AM every single morning to make time for the gym. 
• And last, and most definitely my favorite, I have started taking time to cook dinner.  From scratch.

I know this may seem like a very small list of very mundane accomplishments, but I was proud of myself.  Mostly because all of these things required me to make time for myself.  Recently, I was talking to a close friend about some people within our group of friends.  We were discussing how relationships are all about the "give and take."  Some people are more naturally givers, while others are takers.  The key to a strong, positive friendship, romantic relationship, or really any relationship is to strike the balance between the give and the take.  After we talked, I started thinking about the "give and take" in terms of my relationship with myself.  I realized that I have been being a "taker."  I was taking away time that I desperately needed for myself and giving to other things and commitments (i.e. work, school, errands, etc.) so that I have rarely, over the past four years, had any time for myself.

So, this very small list of very mundane accomplishments is the beginning of my decision to be more of a giver.  Yes, I will give myself time to go have coffee with a friend I've missed.  Yes, I will give myself time to work out and feel good about myself.  Yes, I will give myself time to improve my spirituality and my intellect by reading and thinking and praying.  I have found that, as an adult, it is SO easy to fill every block of time with an activity, to block out the possibility of having to think about scary things like an unknown future.  But you know what?  I'm going to give myself time for that, too, because I think the unknown is starting to look less and less scary and more and more exciting.

Patience is a Virtue

As a child I loved books.  I started reading and couldn't stop, and even before I could read I loved being read to by others.  At the risk of sounding like a complete and total nerd, my mother told me, when I got older, that unlike most children, I slept with my books and not stuffed animals.  I don't remember this, but I've come to terms with this potentially embarrassing piece of information now.  In fact, I still love to read.  It is one of my favorite pastimes, and a huge stress reliever.  One of the first books that I remember having read to me was a big book at my parents' house called The Children's Book of Virtues. The Book of Virtues is a collection of fables, fairy tales, and short stories that each teach a specific lesson or has a moral that is easily identifiable for children.  I can remember sitting with my dad before bed and listening while he would read me a story, and we would talk about what I learned.  (Sidenote: Typing this, for some reason, makes this whole scenario sound super cheesy and storybook-esque on its own, but I promise that this really did happen in my childhood.  I had, and still have, awesome parents.)

Anyway, I couldn't tell you the names of any of those stories, or, for that matter, most of the morals that I was supposed to learn.  I can, however, tell you the one phrase that this childhood memory has engrained in my mind forever: Patience is a virtue.  I have always, and continue to be, a very impatient person.  I'm that person who taps their foot in the bank teller line and the checkout at Target; I hate traffic.  If I could teleport from place to place to make my arrival more immediate, I would.  I know what I want, and I have never been able to come to terms with the idea that I can't always have it when I want.  Keep in mind, that I am fully aware that the expectation for instant gratification is extremely childish.  I feel like a grownup in a lot of areas, but I'm a work in progress, too, I guess.  When I was a child, I was equally impatient.  I can remember my dad reciting that line over and over and over in various situations: Patience is a virtue.


Recently, I have had lots of opportunities at work to be more virtuous and patient, and it has brought this little mantra to mind.  At my day job, where I sell women's clothes, I work with a very wide variety of customers.  We have women come in who immediately give the "back off and don't sell me things" vibe.  They are perfectly capable of finding what they need, and that's fine with me.  I'm there if they need me and am happy to help.  However, we also have customers who come in and expect you to drop everything to pull every item that they might like, work with them for hours, and then buy nothing.  Patience is a virtue.  As a dance teacher, I get to exercise patience everyday, when girls would rather discuss their weekends and boyfriends and breakups than work on their dance technique or listen to anything I have to say.  Patience is a virtue.

I think the Rolling Stones said it best:  "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need."  And most of the time, I am pretty sure what you need might just be what you least expect.  So, as a new week starts, I'll continue to remind myself that patience really is a virtue.  Since I'm working on the constantly improving, grownup version of myself, it'll be good for me to be more virtuous.  I just can't wait 'til I finally get there....

Finding Happy

"I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances." 
-Martha Washington


This has been one of my favorite quotes for a long time.  My mom sent this to me my freshman year of college, and it has inhabited my "favorite quotes" on Facebook ever since.  It's so hard for me to remember that happiness is a choice, not some mysterious feeling that just happens upon us based on our surroundings.  I thought about this quote recently, because I began reading a book called The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  I was initially intrigued by the title.  What could a happiness project entail?  The premise of Rubin's book is that most of us are happy (and extremely blessed); we just aren't as happy as we could be, because we allow the clutter of life to drag us down into a less happy place.  Her answer was to set attainable resolutions for each of the twelve months in a year that she felt would make her a happier person, or at least a person more able to recognize the reasons she should be happy.  


In a lot of ways, I feel like Gretchen Rubin.  I am fully aware of my many blessings.  I have a wonderful, supportive, and loving circle of family and friends that I can always rely on.  I have two jobs that I love.  I am healthy and have my whole future ahead of me.  But in the midst of all these blessings, I have found that it is so easy for me to slip into a state of discontent.  I worry that I'm not good enough or that I'm not reaching my full potential.  I get bogged down in the little things like cleaning my house and doing laundry and paying my bills, and then I start to focus on the negative rather than the positive.  I have a friend who always used to say "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative."  Well, that statement is WAY easier said than done.  For example, I could focus on the fact that I have two great jobs that I love, that I get to work with people all day, and that I am lucky to have these two jobs when there are people who don't have any job at all.  Instead, I constantly find myself complaining, both to myself and to others, about how overly busy I am and all the 700,456,259,483 things that I have to get done in a week, and how impossible it all is, and blah blah blah etc, etc.  


So the first resolution in my "happiness project," and my wisdom for this week, is that we have to be "determined to be cheerful and happy," just like Martha Washington.  A couple weeks ago, when I couldn't drag myself out of bed because I had put off going to the doctor for a month, a friend brought me Chinese food (because I was SO sick of chicken noodle soup).  The fortune cookie I got that day is now taped on my bathroom mirror as a daily reminder.  It says "happiness is a journey, not a destination."  Everyday is filled with choices, and the first one we make when we wake up every morning is whether or not each day is going to be a good one.  I am choosing to make every, single day a happy one.  Complaining is a personal decision to clutter our lives with reasons to be less happy.  And I just have to face the fact that I have hundreds of reasons to be blissfully happy everyday.  In the words of my late grandpa, "Everyday I wake up is a good day."  It's definitely about time I made it that way.

Wisdom from a New "Middle Place"

Well, I have officially been a college graduate for a month, and I can tell you this: College graduation is underwhelming.  When you graduate from high school, there's this huge sense of expectancy and looking at the future--making your own way and your own path.  When you graduate from college, you go to work.  In fact, I went to work the day after my college graduation (and the fourteen days straight after that).  Talk about jumping into the "real world."  But I'm not complaining.  I didn't start a teaching job, obviously, because during those fourteen days that I was working every teacher in the country was kicking back and loving their winter break.  I got a job at a great little boutique near my house, and I work with two other wonderful women, who I already love dearly, selling some pretty fabulous clothes that I am constantly tempted to spend my paycheck on.  When I got this job in November, my mother's response was "Wow, Jess, way to use your degree!"  Thanks, mom.  While this job has nothing to do with my degree, I thought, after the hustle and chaos of my student teaching semester, that I wanted a breather--six months to catch my breath and apply for jobs for the fall.

But I cannot tell a lie, I miss being in the classroom so much.  I love chaos and noise and the sound of middle school dramas in the hallways.  I finally got my teaching license in the mail this week, and that's when it really hit me that I just could not wait to get into a classroom again.  And so the search begins for a new classroom, new students, and another new experience for me, my first "real, big girl job."  In the meantime, I plan to continue blogging, but from a new "middle place."  I've been debating for the past month, since graduation, whether or not I would continue this blog.  But I've learned a few things, even in the past month that I feel are important to throw out into the expansive blogging universe, and, technically, I'm still in the middle.  Now I'm in what I like to think of as the "almost grown-up" middle--that place between graduating from school and finding my first "real job."  I think we can all learn a lot from living in limbo.  So for at least the next six months (hopefully that's all because I'll get a teaching job!) I'll be blogging about wisdom from a new "middle place."

While I've actually learned lots of little random lessons since I graduated into the "real world," I'll just share three with you for now.

1. When your dad tells you to always check that hose behind your washing machine before you do laundry, do it.  That's right, I flooded my entire laundry room.  Like not just a little bit.  I'm talking about a semi-Noah's ark situation on my laundry room floor.  Even when you think you're a grownup, your parents still know best.  True story.

2. Don't put off until tomorrow what you could do today. Yes.  I just used an extremely overused euphemism to provide wisdom.  But it really is so applicable.  For example, if you're sick today, go to the doctor today.  Don't wait until you can barely function (I did this and was sick for a month).  If your GRE is in a week, study today (not the night before for two hours-ish....oops!).  I've found that this little saying has become very applicable in my life.  For some reason, having a little less on my plate has increased my tendency toward procrastination.  Go figure.

3. Most importantly, have a little faith.  After I made it through the craziness of the holidays, I sat down and started to think about my future.  It only took me about five minutes of thinking about that to have a mini panic attack that I would never get hired, never find a significant other, never go anywhere with my life, etc., etc.  It's almost like graduating brings on a little quarter life crisis.  However, I took a deep breath and realized that all those things weren't going to come on my timing.  They'll come when the time is right.  And that's a God thing, not a "me" thing.  While I still occasionally have moments of "where am I going" thoughts, I have gotten comfortable with the idea of working my hardest and having a little faith.  I know I'll end up right where I'm supposed to be.  And right now I'm pretty positive I'm just supposed to be right here.  Happy almost weekend!