I don't often offer a link for a video that takes twenty minutes, but
here one is. The speaker's name is Arielle Ford, and she was the publicist for Deepak Chopra and Jack
Canfield. Clearly she knew her business. But then at the age of 43 she realized that as successful as her career was, she was alone. She turned her attention to finding a life partner, and was married within a year.
But having been single for so long she was lacking in the skills necessary for shared living space. Her husband drove her crazy. Arielle prayed about it and used a concept borrowed from the Japanese, called Wabi Sabi, in which the broken part of a porcelain
vase is seen as precious. Instead of trying to correct her husband's habits she looked for the good in them.
Arielle had a friend who had a Wabi Sabi moment when her husband always left crumbs on the floor after slicing bread for breakfast. It bothered her until she thought about what would make the problem go away. If her husband left her! She burst into tears and gratefully wiped up the mess.
I knew a woman in California whose
husband died of cancer after three years of marriage. She told me how much she missed his socks on the floor, and how willingly she would pick them up. But he was gone. Her floor was clean.
There are habits that John has that used to annoy me. But I realized that the infraction lasted about four seconds, and my reaction went on for half an hour. Clearly the problem was in my court. Close the cupboard, turn off the basement light, take out the trash, put away the
cheese.
Arielle offers the possibility of rebranding the notion of perfection in a relationship to "pure fiction" instead.
There. I just saved you eighteen minutes. You don't need to watch the speech. Use the time to run around the house and turn off lights and sweep up crumbs.
