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Tonight at dinner we were discussing divorce.  I don’t remember how it came up; all I know is that we went there.  The conversation started innocently enough.  Well, maybe there was some guilt in there…mainly mine.

I was in trouble.  Why?  Simply: I hadn’t acknowledged that today is the anniversary of my engagement to my wife.  For the newbies in the house: yes, this becomes an anniversary to celebrate.  There will be more, trust me.  As does occur from time to time, I might have forgotten to mention it, hence, I was in trouble.

When I finally told my boys what makes today special to us, my wife added, “We’ve been making each other crazy for…years.”  She and I had a good laugh.  After all, how else do you explain marriage?  My boys didn’t find it that funny.  In fact, my oldest said, “Ohhh…is that why so many people get divorced?  They spend all that time driving each other crazy?”  Sincere.

Crap.  We stepped in it.

You can only try desperately to back-pedal in these situations, so that’s what we did.  We explained all kinds of stuff, going off on tangents about the politics of marriage in medieval times and non-industrial societies, the ways in which marriages bound clans and kingdoms and nations, the status of women in pre-industrial society and the post 1970’s “Women’s Lib” movement…normal dinner conversation for a boy approaching 10 and his younger brother who is halfway to 6.  We intellectualized them into distraction.

Or so we thought.

It’s at the end of the discussion that my youngest weighs in on divorce:

“Do you know what I think happens?  I think that people are all swe-e-e-e-t an’ stuff before they get married because they want to get married.  Then I think after they get married they aren’t good any more.  That’s what I think.”

That about sums it up.  Maybe it doesn’t exactly explain divorce, but I think he nailed the crux of most marital problems right on the head.

Maybe it’s about time for a little more sweetness.

It is impossible to wade in any body of water, no matter how careful we are, without creating ripples. We move through the water, and the laws of physics take care of the rest. It is simple and inevitable and completely predictable. That’s how it works with water. In other areas of life, the ripple is harder to predict. We can study a situation over time and with great care and still get the prognostication wrong. That’s just the way things go. Embracing the inevitability can be freeing, but anticipating the eventual errors in judgment can be debilitating. Both states of mind require a level of awareness and consciousness that comes from being present in the moment. Then there’s the third option: ignorance. Ignorance of the ripples we create is almost certainly a result of self-absorption and of an unconscious departure from our awareness of the moment.

It is unfortunate when our actions create consequences we did not have the presence to anticipate or even contemplate. We can never control all the variables, but we can always maintain mindfulness and seek to be instantly aware of our unintended ripples.

It’s funny how we all process change a little differently. Take my little guy, for example.

My youngest son is just shy of 1st grade. We’re living in a foreign country now, so he’s adjusting to public school in a similar yet very different culture. The kids speak with accents. They use words he doesn’t always understand. Even his teacher takes a different approach to running her classroom than the one to which he is accustomed. Just the other day, she asked him to please sit down and finish his coloring assignment. Being the former Montessori student that he is, his very respectful reply was, “No thank you. I don’t think I want to do that right now.”. And he kept meandering around the room. Thats what he does: he meanders.

But yesterday was a bigger deal. Yesterday was his first day since starting he new school during which they had PE. Even though my son goes to a public school, he has to wear a uniform, so PE means changing out of his slacks and school sweatshirt and into more appropriate PE clothing. Changing in public caused him a bit of grief, just as it has his older brother. Perhaps I’ve done something wrong because neither of my boys are comfortable with being shirtless in public. I don’t know.

Regardless, he was a bit taken aback by the whole experience, and he eagerly related the ordeal to his Mommy when she met his at the school gate at the end of his day. Sensing his obvious excitement she said to him, “Wow, there must have been a lot of nipples,” in an attempt to inject some humor into the moment. I mean, what little boy doesn’t erupt into laughter at the word “nipple?”. Seriously. Go check it out. I’ll wait.

But my son’s response was unexpected. “No, the girls were there, too,” he said. “There were nipples and breasts everywhere!”

Change is something we all face. There is no escaping it. What matters most is how you deal with it. For my little guy, although wrestling with his own challenges adjusting to major changes in his life, part of the process entails confiding in his mother, sharing with her the sources of his turmoil. He has shared with me some of his biggest fears about moving to this new country. The moral of the story is that dealing with change happens only by acknowledging and then confronting the change, the source of the fear. The story was not really about the nipples; it was about finding someone to whom you can relate your experiences. Change doesn’t just blow over, and hiding your fear of change will never get you anywhere.

Tell your story.

Sit! Good boy! Here’s a treat!

I’ve traveled with my wife and kids to the other side of the ocean. The Atlantic, to be exact. We’ve moved here, actually; we aren’t just here on a vay-kay. This is our new life.

Forgive me if I’ve been quiet recently. The move and everything it has entailed have given my lizard brain plenty of material to use, plenty of excuses and opportunities to avoid the real work…

But I am here now, settling in. My family, too. We are well. I have started my new job. Life is taking shape.

But I came here for a reason. And it is time to get back to the work.

I was in Belfast two weeks ago. It’s a great city. The first thing I did after checking into the hotel was take a walk. It was Sunday morning, so not much was going on in the streets. However, down the street from the Belfast Hilton is a “weekend market.”. It was open, so I checked it out.

The market was alive with activity. Even though it was cold outside and the air in the market was smoky from sizzling breakfast food, there were plenty of people milling about. It was a great first experience in the city, and it gave us a hint of what was to come.

At the tail end of our trip, on the last might in town, I went to a Mexican restaurant to get a sense of what “Mexican” means in this part of the UK. So, I started my trip by jumping right into Belfast life and ended it by looking at a part of the world through Belfast-tinted lenses.

Mexican food in Belfast is sort of like Mexican food but not really. It has all the right ingredients. The familiar tastes are all there. It even looks sort of right. But it isn’t; it just isn’t right. There is just something…missing. But the wrongness makes sense in it’s own way.

Everything suffers by comparison if it’s not the original. Sounds elementary, I know, but it’s often an overlooked truth. Unfortunately, we spend a crapload of time making those comparisons. And when we compare the present to the idealized past, the present fails the comparison test. How can it not?

The present can never be a return to the past. The past can never be brought into the present. They are, by definition, mutually exclusive. No matter how hard you try, no matter how many of the original ingredients you gather together, every attempt to recreate the past is simply another present moment.

So, appreciate THAT; appreciate the present moment. Don’t curse it for what it isn’t; love it for what it IS.

Sort of Like Mexican food in Belfast.

I should be writing because there’s a lot on my mind, but this transatlantic travel stuff is tiring for those of us not practiced in the art. That’s all I’ve got: a transatlantic excuse.

Off we go, now, to try something different. 850 miles by road, and that’s just the start. Planes and another car are in the cards before we get to see this new place for ourselves.

We’re planning on something different in 2011. This is just the beginning!