This is becoming an almost-weekly tradition when I take an idea from the Gretchen Rubin/Liz Craft podcast, expand on it, and apply it to my own life. So this was episode #100 (hey, a good time for you to start listening if you haven’t yet done so!), and for this special episode they centered the whole podcast around listener questions. One listener asked about their relationship as sisters, how they manage to get along so well and whether or not they’ve ever had a big blowup.
So no, they haven’t had the big upset, although they admit, “We’ve snapped at each other. We’ve exasperated each other.” But here’s the big takeaway:
“We do try not to judge each other . . Just to let that person be who they are, appreciate their quirks, celebrate their quirks, but still have like honest, open conversation.” This is Liz speaking, the rather laid-back, messy, prone-to-procrastination sister, about Gretchen, who is pretty much just the opposite. In fact, so proactive rather than procrastinating is she that, during her first year in law school she stayed on campus during Thanksgiving break to write a long paper that was going to be due at the end of the year. (I may have written about this incident before–just did a brief search and didn’t find it, though, and I may have the exact details wrong, but she did, indeed, skip a vacation break to write a paper ahead of time. Sheesh!) This “we try not to judge” is a variant of the “I love you just the way you are/you could do better” tension that the two sisters have also talked about.
I want to zero in on one phrase: “Celebrate their quirks.” A quirk is not a character flaw, just to be clear. It’s a . . . well, a quirk. An oddity. My habit of leaving my shoes all over the place is a quirk, I guess. My husband’s refusal to use a decent knife to slice an onion is a quirk. So why do I nag him to use a chef’s knife rather than a dinner knife? Because it drives me crazy, that’s why. But what difference does it make? Hey, if he wants those onion slices to look as if they were hacked out with a popsicle stick, so what? But Gretch and Liz have set the bar even higher than mere tolerance: they’re saying to celebrate the quirks. In other words, to see them as positives, as part of making that person who he or she is.
Two things (would) happen here (if I were to do this): I would save myself unnecessary angst, and, more importantly, I would save my emotional capital. If I fuss about absolutely everything, then my fussing recedes into the background. Why should Jim listen to me when I have something important to fuss about if that’s all he hears from me? But if he knows I don’t/won’t bring something up unless it’s really important, then he’ll be much more liable to pay attention.
Maybe we should all start “loved ones quirks” lists. Maybe we should remind ourselves of how much we’d miss seeing those ragged onion halves in the vegetable crisper. (Or those leftovers stored in a container about three times bigger than necessary.) What about you? What quirks could you celebrate about others, and what quirks would you like to see celebrated about you?