This Stuff is Hard

The woman i'm in love with is very generous in reminding me that i sometimes (often) respond to her statement of feelings by justifying, explaining or contradicting. what i fail to do is simply acknowledge her.
this hurts her. she wants to be heard and values being heard above most things.
i get it and i'm working on it. it's hard for me-the little man inside hates to be misperceived and he hates to let a problem/pain go unaddressed. and i'm working on it.

this is hard stuff to work on, the impulse to set things right is almost automatic. for instance, this morning i was telling the woman i'm in love with how powerful the writing is in her book. and i admitted that sometimes the book is hard for me to read because it's so full of her old boyfriend.
immediately she responded "well, you know, he was there when i was writing it."

so if this advanced soul can miss her own mark so dramatically, what hope is there for me? i guess i'll just have to keep paying attention and remind myself that the beauty lies on the path to perfection.

it shouldn't be hard at all

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i have a new word: pivot. to pivot is to notice that you're heading down a deadening alley and to spin immediately and head back in an enlivening direction. when i tell the woman i'm in love with that i caught her in mid-air over her own petard, she says:

good point ... I would have been fine if you pointed out that I wasn't walking my talk when it happened.

she pivots and the fact of her matter is that she would have been fine. for the moment, until the right muscles develop, i'm borrowing the yoga of the word itself-"wait! i'm pivoting"
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we are testing upper limits a bit tonight and tomorrow. we're going to a concert then spending saturday night together and attending an open house on sunday. four days in a row, hmm.