We all have our priorities in life… we decide daily what comes first, where things stand, how to allocate our resources. All fine and dandy if you make these decisions and they have little impact on anyone else (say you live alone or run your own company).
Any time you add a person to a situation, the priority matrix shifts to include the other person’s perspective. Even if you have decided in your own mind that the other person will not influence your priorities or decision making process, it becomes inevitable that, at some point, your priorities will be at odds because there are very few situations in life where a decision made that impacts more than one person will ALWAYS be prioritized by each party in a situation in exactly the same way.
An example…. it’s dinnertime and you are trying to decide what to have to eat. One person who lives alone can decide that they want pizza with extra garlic on it, order that pizza, eat that pizza and be happy. Add a second person who may actually be ok with pizza but all that garlic is not so ok because it makes them feel like their breath smells.
So now, one person either has to give up their preferred pizza or two pizzas have to be ordered or some sort of compromise has to be reached. And this sort of priority shifting happens for most of us on a daily basis, so much that it fails to even register when we’re doing the shifting.
It can be very frustrating when you are faced with someone whose priorities don’t match yours. Further frustrated by different life experiences, people having different things happen in their lives that colour their perceptions, etc.
I’ve spent the majority of my adult life seeking someone who had priorities similar to mine. And seeking some sort of peace. After what could be called a fairly tempestuous youth, I wanted to live in an atmosphere of harmony… or at least an atmosphere that didn’t have a bunch of discord.
The conclusion that I have come to is that there is some fatal flaw within me that will not allow me to find the peace I seek unless I walk the road of life alone. And as the years pass, I find myself facing this fact with more frequency. It tends to like to kick me when I’m down.
I expect too much. I can’t let go of lofty dreams and aspirations. I can’t just “settle” (no matter how it may appear). Good is not good ENOUGH. And that is why there is chaos and disharmony in my life. Because no one, not even me, can live up to my standards and I am loathe to relax them. I know what I would do in a given situation… I look at the grim reality and realize that even if it won’t happen, I need to know the worst case scenario in order to be able to ratchet my expectations to something reasonable. I contemplate doing things that would be ruinous to my quality of life because it would create harmony elsewhere and I just want the discord to STOP. But keeping up the facade that everything is fine and nothing is wrong is exhausting.
I guess I need to re-examine and shuffle some more and find a way to give myself a rest. Discord burns me out fast. I’m exhausted and need to make it a priority to figure out how to fix that.
Have a stellar weekend, y’all.
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