One of the benefits of choosing to spend a lot of time with your extended family or your local community is that those groups will naturally have some people you get along with better than others. That’s a good thing. Being able to find common ground or polite interaction with diverse people is an incredible strength.

I love intentional communities – if you find the online fan club for your favorite book, definitely talk to them! Make friends! It’s great to do that… just not exclusively.

You need to be around people with a little more friction than that. You need to sand off your own roughest edges and find ways to interact and build together.

So go to the family reunion or the neighborhood barbecue. Not as a chore – as an adventure!

Getting people not to do stuff is tricky. Trickier than getting them to do stuff, I think.

Partially you have the “pink elephant” problem – if I tell you “don’t think about a pink elephant,” what’s the first thing you think of? Heck, it’s the only thing. Your brain fixates on sentence subjects, not silly modifiers like “don’t.” So if I tell you not to touch the cookie jar, you become fixated on touching the cookie jar pretty quickly.

The second problem is that in simply telling people not to do something, you alert at least some number of people that The Thing was an option in the first place. A sign reading “Please Don’t Take the Unguarded Gold Coins from Behind the Counter” alerts people about the existence of unguarded bullion that didn’t already know about it.

But in any case, it’s harder to dissuade than persuade.

Tonight was opening night for my eldest daughter’s latest play. This is a major event for her, for multiple reasons. First, this is the last “kids'” show she’ll ever be in; she ages out of the youth theater program after this. But more importantly, as a fine capstone to her youth theater experience, she got the role she auditioned for: the main villain!

That’s right, my daughter is playing the evil Queen Aggravain in Once Upon a Mattress, a cheeky retelling of the Princess & The Pea story. It was a really fun play, and my daughter killed it. She was born to play villains!

She’s worked so hard pursuing something she loves so dearly – what else is there in life? To work hard at something you love, and to enjoy the fruits of that labor; this is the greatest life imaginable. She’s perfect, I love her, and she makes me proud every day.

Brava, Beanstalk!

While I think efficiency is generally a good thing, any trait taken too far becomes a negative. There’s a particular version of this that I’ve noticed I keep doing to myself, and I want to work on stopping.

Here’s what I do: I notice during the week that I feel a little stressed and want some relaxation time. Because my schedule is somewhat full given work, kids, etc., I will wake up earlier than I have to in order to squeeze in some extra relaxation time before I have to do whatever I need to do.

So now I’m stressed and tired.

And when I wake up, I either take longer to get moving because I’m both tired and lacking in urgency (since whatever I need to do is farther away), or I do manage to do something fun, but then get wrapped up in it and end up being more stressed because I scramble to get to my responsibilities!

So I’m going to try, next week, to do something similar to “observing the Sabbath.” I’m going to pick a day next week and clear it – no responsibilities, no planned activities, etc. Just a chill day. I will guard that schedule with my life, and I’ll let the rest of the week be what it is. I won’t try to force relaxation in (I’ll still take breaks and all, I’m not crazy, just not big “relaxation activities”). I’ll use the knowledge of the coming Day of Rest to shelve my stress.

We’ll see if it works!

My middle child has about the most expansive mental library of animal facts you’ll ever encounter. She loves animals and she loves facts, so it’s a natural state of affairs. Today, I took her and some of her siblings and cousins to the zoo, which she was delighted about.

On the drive there, she made an off-hand comment that it would be hard for her to learn anything new, since she already knew “every fact about animals.” While I could have corrected her hubris, I elected not to – that wasn’t the lesson I wanted to come out of this very teachable moment. I didn’t want to belittle her expansive knowledge base; it is, after all, quite impressive! Instead, I just wanted to challenge the notion that you could ever know everything. And I wanted it to be fun.

So I gave her a challenge: If she could find 5 animal facts in the zoo that she didn’t already know, she’d earn a prize. What a delightful scavenger hunt it was! She definitely found five and earned her prize, and I was happy with the lesson: it’s not always about how much you already know. It’s about how much you can still learn, every day.

It’s interesting the way social conditioning will keep us from pointing out – or in some cases, even noticing – the absurd. We’re social creatures, wired for that kind of interaction. We find “getting along” to be more important than most ridiculous things we might see. Pointing out the absurd might lead to conflict, and most of us are naturally conflict-avoidant.

But the scoundrels in our midst will use that to social engineer us to our absurd graves. So every once in a while, point it out just to keep them guessing.

As I type these words, a set of astronauts are the farthest away from Earth that humans have ever been. They’re looking at the moon’s far side, and I wept when I listened to them name a newly-discovered feature after one of the astronaut’s late wife.

The sacrifices that humans are capable of making in order to go one step further in our understanding, our exploration, our drive to satiate our curiosity – it’s insane. Purely irrational. Spectacular.

May we never lose that spark. May the most insane among us reach ever-greater heights, always. May we climb the highest mountain, always, simply because it’s there.

Happy Easter, everyone. May your eggs be many, delicious, and found with love.

Today, my son told new stories. We, as a large extended family, discussed the new baby that’s on the way from one of our kin. One of my nieces drove my car, with me in the passenger seat giving instructions. One of my cousins asked my advice about buying his first house.

All this growth! And it happened at the cemetery, as we were there together to honor our departed.

Because that’s part of it all. The milestones and growth, the joy and accomplishment. Saying goodbye is part of it.

We say goodbye together.

I’m always interested in ways to avoid arguments. Every time I accidentally argue with someone (a rare occurrence, thankfully!), I reflect after the fact on what went wrong and how I could have better seen the trap before I fell into it.

Here’s a new technique I’m developing for figuring out if a discussion is worth having early on: asking if the other person wants to be “locally right” or “universally right.”

It’s just a weird way of saying “is this an opinion debate or not,” without using those words. (I find that novel phrasing tends to take people out of the mindset of embedding words with meaning that the speaker did not intend.)

For example, let’s say I tell you that the novel Wuthering Heights is a brilliant work of gothic fiction and well worth the read, and that the recent film adaptation is wild, hot garbage. You contend that the movie is a brilliant work of cinema that transforms a dry, unreadable book into something enjoyable.

In this instance, I am of course right. But you can be right as well, in another frame of reference, because this isn’t a matter that has an objective, universal answer. For my frame of reference, you’re “locally right” if you agree with me, and you’re “locally wrong” if you don’t. The further away from me you move, socially speaking, the less wrong you become. If you hang out with other people with terrible taste (ha!), then your opinion can be “locally right” over there.

Now, if you say that the novel Wuthering Heights is set on the planet Neptune in the year 3000 AD, then you’re universally wrong. That’s not a matter of taste, opinion, etc. So if you’re wrong about that here, there’s nowhere else where you’re right.

An important note: people can have incorrect beliefs about universal truths, because people have free will and imperfect information. This fact does not mean that all debates are local matters of opinion! It just means that people can be both universally wrong as well as locally wrong. You can even be universally wrong but locally right, and vice versa! You can say things that everyone around you agrees with, making you locally right, even if that thing is objectively untrue.

So my question is framed in that way – before getting into a debate, I want to find out if the other person believes the subject to be a matter of local or universal debate. Are they arguing about whether the Atlantic or Pacific ocean has better beaches, or are they arguing about which ocean is bigger? A very critical piece of information I’m looking for here is whether or not the other person understands which category we’re in.

If the person says that the Atlantic is bigger than the Pacific and then doesn’t believe me when I tell them otherwise, I don’t want to go one step further before I establish whether or not the other person even believes that there’s an objective answer to that question. While that’s a simplistic answer, I’ve discovered that lots of people believe they’re engaging in a local debate when the subject they’re arguing over has an objective, universal answer.

If they recognize that the subject does, in fact, have a universal answer, then the discussion might (might) be productive. But if they don’t – if they think that it’s a matter of opinion and they’re just trying to persuade you to their side – then you might as well end the discussion. Even if you aren’t sure that you’re right, you’re much better off researching the topic further on your own to seek the correct answer, rather than argue with this person.

If you do choose to argue anyway… well, you can decide what kind of wrong you are later.