From The River Wild:
Meryl: ... I'm sick of the whole thing. I'm sick of the whole fight. Everything has become unbelievably hard.
Her mom: Huh. Honey, forgive me, but you don't know what hard is. That's because you give yourself an out. In our generation, we had no out. That was the pact of marriage. Do you think if I gave myself an out ... with your father, given his orneriness and his deafness, that I wouldn't have taken it years ago?
I have often chatted with my daughters about the difference between the hard and the impossible, and that distinction has been in my mind frequently of late. (Not, by the way, because of my marriage; to quote Joe Dirt, you're paying attention to the wrong part of the story, man.) I think that the values of delayed gratification, sacrifice, and paying for things as you go are increasingly ... not valued.
I have friends that run into hard times, and I understand hard times -- I grew up in them, and most of the world, based on current levels of expectations, is still in them now (not Iraq or Haiti level, but not where people think they should be). There is no shame in being poor. But I increasingly hear people that refuse to change their expectations even when their situations change. They still get a Starbucks? Why? "I just need one." Why don't you move to a smaller house? "I just couldn't make my kids share a room," or "We'd be on top of each other."
And it's not just money. All of the time people will tell me about how they spent their non-paying portion of the day doing whatever (watching a football game, hunting, shopping, catching up on House, sleeping, etc.), then complain about how they didn't have time to do X, where X is the thing that they want me to believe they really value (spend time with their kids, do their homework, practice yodeling, whatever).
I can't say I had a great childhood; we had a classically dysfunctional family. But it was by no means all bad, and one lesson I learned from both of my parents was that there is a different between the hard and the impossible. "I can't" is sometimes right, but only for those things that are truly impossible. "I can't lift a Buick (unless I become enraged after being bombarded with gamma radiation" or "I can't become the King of England." Those are impossible.
"I can't quit smoking" is ... well, a lie. It's just hard. I don't mean "just hard" as a euphemism for "easy" because I know quitting smoking must be earth-shatteringly hard. My father, an alcoholic, stopped drinking and didn't have any alcohol for 33 years, even though he yearned for it almost every day in those 33 years (according to him) ... but he never could quite stop smoking, even when the doctors told him (quite correctly, as it turned out) that it would kill him. But it wasn't impossible, it was just (really, really) hard.
So, toss in your favorite excuses here. "I can't study without the TV on." "I can't make it to class/work on time." "I can't ...." Probably you can, but you don't want to admit that the way you have prioritized your life excludes it.
My own instance of this vice is when I say, "I can't work out right now; I'm too busy." But yet I find time to check my Facebook, pretty much daily. I find time to read leisurely most evenings. I go to restaurants for lunch. I type long blogs. So, I COULD work out -- I just choose to do those other things, instead.
It is the exact same distinction, by the way, as between "I need" and "I want." We need very few things. Check out the people living through the cluster that is Haiti right now (or take a drive down into the Delta, for something closer to central AR); they are living, most of them without Starbucks, American Idol, a sports car, or a home theater room. Both of my daughters would get irritated with me when they would say things like, "I need you to take me to my friend's house," and I would say ... "No you don't. You want me to." "You know what I mean!," they would reply angrily, and I: "They aren't the same thing, and if you believe they are, you are lying to yourself ... which is even worse than lying to me." I'm sure that got me their vote for father of the year. heh.
But, though I want to be father of the year, I don't need to.
And it's not impossible to avoid end-of-post puns, but it's hard enough that I won't make the effort.
Meryl: ... I'm sick of the whole thing. I'm sick of the whole fight. Everything has become unbelievably hard.
Her mom: Huh. Honey, forgive me, but you don't know what hard is. That's because you give yourself an out. In our generation, we had no out. That was the pact of marriage. Do you think if I gave myself an out ... with your father, given his orneriness and his deafness, that I wouldn't have taken it years ago?
I have often chatted with my daughters about the difference between the hard and the impossible, and that distinction has been in my mind frequently of late. (Not, by the way, because of my marriage; to quote Joe Dirt, you're paying attention to the wrong part of the story, man.) I think that the values of delayed gratification, sacrifice, and paying for things as you go are increasingly ... not valued.
I have friends that run into hard times, and I understand hard times -- I grew up in them, and most of the world, based on current levels of expectations, is still in them now (not Iraq or Haiti level, but not where people think they should be). There is no shame in being poor. But I increasingly hear people that refuse to change their expectations even when their situations change. They still get a Starbucks? Why? "I just need one." Why don't you move to a smaller house? "I just couldn't make my kids share a room," or "We'd be on top of each other."
And it's not just money. All of the time people will tell me about how they spent their non-paying portion of the day doing whatever (watching a football game, hunting, shopping, catching up on House, sleeping, etc.), then complain about how they didn't have time to do X, where X is the thing that they want me to believe they really value (spend time with their kids, do their homework, practice yodeling, whatever).
I can't say I had a great childhood; we had a classically dysfunctional family. But it was by no means all bad, and one lesson I learned from both of my parents was that there is a different between the hard and the impossible. "I can't" is sometimes right, but only for those things that are truly impossible. "I can't lift a Buick (unless I become enraged after being bombarded with gamma radiation" or "I can't become the King of England." Those are impossible.
"I can't quit smoking" is ... well, a lie. It's just hard. I don't mean "just hard" as a euphemism for "easy" because I know quitting smoking must be earth-shatteringly hard. My father, an alcoholic, stopped drinking and didn't have any alcohol for 33 years, even though he yearned for it almost every day in those 33 years (according to him) ... but he never could quite stop smoking, even when the doctors told him (quite correctly, as it turned out) that it would kill him. But it wasn't impossible, it was just (really, really) hard.
So, toss in your favorite excuses here. "I can't study without the TV on." "I can't make it to class/work on time." "I can't ...." Probably you can, but you don't want to admit that the way you have prioritized your life excludes it.
My own instance of this vice is when I say, "I can't work out right now; I'm too busy." But yet I find time to check my Facebook, pretty much daily. I find time to read leisurely most evenings. I go to restaurants for lunch. I type long blogs. So, I COULD work out -- I just choose to do those other things, instead.
It is the exact same distinction, by the way, as between "I need" and "I want." We need very few things. Check out the people living through the cluster that is Haiti right now (or take a drive down into the Delta, for something closer to central AR); they are living, most of them without Starbucks, American Idol, a sports car, or a home theater room. Both of my daughters would get irritated with me when they would say things like, "I need you to take me to my friend's house," and I would say ... "No you don't. You want me to." "You know what I mean!," they would reply angrily, and I: "They aren't the same thing, and if you believe they are, you are lying to yourself ... which is even worse than lying to me." I'm sure that got me their vote for father of the year. heh.
But, though I want to be father of the year, I don't need to.
And it's not impossible to avoid end-of-post puns, but it's hard enough that I won't make the effort.
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