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You know how sometimes there are huge differences between people and the ways we deal with life? And how occasionally those differences create some, well, entertaining moments? Even a bit of craziness?
Hi. I’m Janiel, and I’m a Solar Flare.
Not in a literal sense, because my house would burn down. Rather, in the sense of my feelings. How I take life in and shoot it back out again. The way my brain operates. It’s all a bit dramatic, and ever so unpredictable to live with. (I would know. I live here.)
Now you . . . you might not be anything like this at all. You might be like my husband: the kind of individual who thinks about stuff before he says or does it. Who takes a moment to figure things out before they come spilling from his person. More icebergy-y than solar flare-y. But when he moves on something, it’s decisive. And it gets done.
Like the time I was pregnant with our last child, and one morning I mused that it would be so much nicer to knock out the wall of our tiny kitchen pantry—which amounted to a few shelves and a door—and use the laundry room closet behind it for a real pantry with actual room and organization potential. Then I toddled off to run my errands for the day and forgot the whole thing. When I came back home four hours later the boy was swinging a sledgehammer into the wall and my erstwhile cereal shelves were sitting on the floor.
Whoa.
I throw stuff off the top of my head like that all the time. Then I forget about it—because it’s not my Number One Task at the mo—and assume it will come back up again later if it’s important. Like when the fires at the forefront of my brain have been banked enough to examine the crazy backlog piled up behind them. It’s, as I said, entertaining. And sometimes perplexing.
Huz doesn’t firewalk through his mind like that. He lines everything up in the Coleman-cooler of his frontal lobe, examines it, comes up with a plan, and then puts that plan into action. My tasks have to elbow themselves up to my ocular nerves and wave strobe lights around in semaphore before I can put everything else away long enough to deal with them. And that usually only happens once things have reached a fevered pitch of urgency, and my forgotten tasks have no choice but to go out and buy themselves the dang strobe lights. I mean, don’t get me wrong; once I execute a plan I usually do a respectable job. It’s just, there’s a lot of zigzagging through the battlefield of my attention first, and that sometimes creates issues. Like stress. Lateness. Forgotten details. And undercooked potatoes.
I don’t honestly know if all of this is down to me being a girl, or down to me being me. I mean it is said (in a book by Bill and Pam Farrel) that the male mind is like a waffle—all neatly organized into boring tidy little compartments that get accessed one at a time, with no spillover into the other compartments, allowing for tremendous focus and logic. Whereas the female mind is like a plate of spaghetti—delightfully loopy, linked, relate-y, and lovely, allowing for general awesomeness. And okay, lots of multitasking and processes.
See, as women when we look at something we can take in the whole forest and its trees. In many cases also the leaves, squirrels, tree mites, raindrops, tree forts, root systems, moss, stink bugs, and remains of the kite that one kid down the street lost back in 2003. It all lives happily in our heads—hugging, connecting, and throwing house-warming parties where everything holds hands, sings kumbaya, and serves up Pinterest-inspired petit fours. And that’s really quite lovely. It’s that kind of relational skill that allows us to create peace and mood and nurture and home.
But it’s also the kind of connectivity overload that allows me to walk out of the house with my shirt on backwards or wearing two left shoes (both of which I’ve done. Once to work, the other to a reunion at which my husband’s beautiful ex-girlfriend was going to be, and which is a completely different story that I won’t go into here. At all. Even though it’s entertaining and kind of relates.) (See? Betty-Spaghetti-Brain, right here in this column.)
Oy.
Oy-flared. I mean squared.
You know, I think there’s an actual solution to all of this. And it has to do with balance. Balance brought about by people relaxing a bit and working together no matter what their differences are. Sometimes the gaps between our little waffle-divots and spaghetti-loops are huge, and sometimes they’re barely noticeable. But I have a feeling nature has it all worked out so that whatever we bring to the table can be combined with whatever else is there, to smooth the sharpness, blend the tastes, and add the side dishes until the whole thing becomes a gorgeous feast. As long as we don’t fight it. If we manage to do that, I suspect we’d find flares calming down, icebergs warming up, spaghetti combed into nice little swirls, and waffles soaking up a marvelous new type of syrup that only enhances its flavor. Not to mention a host of other dishes jockeying to get to our table because it’s the healthy, low blood-pressure table despite the chocolate fountain at its center.
So in the end I guess it doesn’t matter what we are: flare, berg, pasta, or compartmentalized-pancake. Those differences between us are the spice of life, and we can pull it together to make them work, with or without the right shoe, the cereal shelves, or the forest and trees. It’s about chilling out and enjoying it all. And also eating before I write my column. (Where the heck is my pasta sauce?)
KurtFebruary 17, 2016
I agree, we each seem to have our own gifts and traits and the world works better when we all listen to each other, cooperate, collaborate. And for some reason your examples that make me want to eat waffles ... good message!