How to Bring the Magic Home
When I Learned That Wisdom Cannot Be Force-Fed
It is not like I am constantly preaching at my husband. It is just that I often seem to come up with brilliant insights and solutions for his problems. Loving wife that I am, I happily share them. Except my husband is not interested. For the longest time I wondered why.
Brazilians call it the dilemma of the saint, who cannot perform miracles at home. My words seem to have a wondrous impact on colleagues, clients, friends, and sometimes complete strangers. While they marvel that my thoughts open their eyes, touch their hearts, and change their lives, all this magic of mine turns to dust as soon as I enter our home.
As far as my husband is concerned, I might as well write my wisdom on toilet paper and flush it, because that’s where it ends up anyway. Worse still, I might talk about the power of the mind or the benefits of inquiry into your thoughts and get an enthusiastic “Hum, ya, did you buy bread?” in return. Then, a few months later, my dear husband will excitedly tell me about this YouTuber (male, of course) that shared this great wisdom about the power of the mind or the benefits of inquiry into your thoughts.
OH YEAH? Tell me about it!
Is He Being Sexist?
Never mind my need for ego gratification disguised as helpfulness. Spending my time brooding over what I thought was sexist bias and the unfairness of it all, I failed to understand the obvious. The obvious being that I had my laser beam on my husband and that, according to quantum physics, cannot go well.
Quantum scientists set up an experiment, where particles were thrown at a screen. They discovered that the mere fact of somebody being in the room watching changed the direction of the particles. Their conclusion was that an object under observation behaves differently.*
It is a conclusion that has stuck in my mind ever since and it had better stick in yours, too.
I started applying it almost immediately. Initially, I applied it to toasters and telephones. I understood that as long as I kept staring at these things, they would never ring and the toast would never pop out. I began to leave the toaster alone so that it could toast my bread. I began to leave the phone alone so that it could ring whenever it was ready. It took another ten years, though, until I was ready to leave my husband alone to ring and pop out toast whenever he was ready.
Because the truth is, it is a freaking drag to live with a saint under the same roof. Always eyeing you to see if some enlightenment has rubbed off already. It is awful. It is a burden. It is annoying.
Once I stopped smearing my wisdom onto my husband’s face, two things happened, one of them almost immediately. The first thing I noticed was that my husband has at least as much wisdom as I do, wisdom that I had not seen before because I was so indulged in my own. I realized that for as much as I was talking about tolerance and prided myself in my ability to see different perspectives, at home I thought I was the only one who held the truth in my hands. And here was another saint living beside me all those years and I had never even seen him in his wisdom.
I began to listen and watch. I heard his stories about his beloved rain forest, his passion for hunting, all the things he had learned from his father. I had been too busy being a good feminist and quickly pointing out his mother’s contributions (just to ‘balance his memory’) in order to appreciate the wealth of lessons and love my husband has received from his father.
Then something interesting happened.
Open Space Conversation
We were at the beach with the girls, playing in the sand. It was peaceful because everyone was working on their own sandcastle or picking wood or splashing in the water. I was digging a trench in the sand, when my husband started making some observations about the fishermen and how they would spend the whole day without being worried whether or not to catch any fish. I casually shared my thoughts about that, just to keep the conversation going.
I was actually more engrossed in my trench building and digging and shoveling the sand away. It was just a light conversation. I had no motive. I had no intention to share wisdom, I had no intention to impose my perspective, I had no intention of teaching. My intention was to dig a trench in the sand. Our conversation was just a very pleasurable kind of background music.
We talked some more. We spoke about energy and how much it influences our experiences. We spoke about why some things work so well for some of us and don’t work at all for others. And after 14 years of being with this man, he told me twice on the same day: “You just shared some real truth. I can’t believe you said those wise words.” I could not believe it either, but it warmed my heart in a different way. In a deep, joyful way. This was not an affirmation of my ego. This was connection. It was light. It was easy. And I realized that I had finally given the space for us to connect.
*What the Bleep Do We Know. William Arntz. Betsy Chasse. Mark Vicente. Movie, 2004
