Seeking Compromise — in the Capitol, and in the Home too

It’s uncanny sometimes how events happening in the big wide world can be mirror images, at once identical and turned around, of events happening by the hearth. This week, I’m trying to figure out whether we have anything to learn from the government shutdown or the government shutdown has anything to learn from us.

Washington D.C. is still in a “stalemate” – not really news at all, I guess.  Over in Egypt, they’re in one too, and that one is violent. I wouldn’t wish one of these on anyone, much less a whole country.  Taken originally from the game of chess, the word means “any situation in which a player cannot move; a deadlock.”   Now, though, instead of seeing two players hunched over a board with only their own egos at stake, we are seeing all of Congress holding the rest of us hostage, in a way.  Something has to shift, but who and when?

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My strange mind also takes this compound word from the huge public arena and jets it over to the much smaller domestic one.  It conjures up images of partners in matrimony who are locked in some kind of unsatisfactory boring life together. No spices left on the shelf, no hearts racing, not even any zest for making plans. Perish the thought, but these would be spouses who might wake up each morning, look over at each other, yawn and say, “Oh, you again?”

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Now don’t go rushing to any conclusions about this line of thinking: my husband and I are just getting re-adjusted to living together again and we’re doing pretty darn well, thank you.  Just last Sunday, in fact, we spent an entire day and evening together. This may not sound like much, but in our particular case, with years of one spouse spending most of most Sundays with a congregation somewhere and the other spouse tending to children and dog as well as doing schoolwork – it was definitely different.

Setting ourselves against the tableau of the politicians in Washington (I see them as frozen figures, hands in mid-air while trying to make a point), I like to look back on that recent Sunday as a day when compromise, leading to a general spirit of togetherness approaching real romance, triumphed over stalemate.

A general definition of compromise goes like this:  “A settlement of a dispute in which two or more sides agree to accept less than they originally wanted.”  Now it’s safe to say that a “dispute” can take many forms and be of different degrees. If events in your house go anything like they go in mine, disagreements are generally of the mild non-earthshaking sort, but they matter nonetheless.

Talking ahead of time about the free Sunday we were about to have, my husband said something like, “I’m planning to work on theIMG_1850 house.”  Now, make no mistake about it, there was plenty to do – both indoors and outdoors; there always is, whether you’re moving in or moving out or just in the middle of being in a house.  Besides all the yet unopened boxes in the basement, we also had various pieces of furniture from my family that were still in our garage, including two big oriental rugs, and we needed to figure out where they should go.  Besides, my husband is and always has been very good at getting stuff done; when it comes to sprucing up a place, in the words of an old high school cheer song, “he don’t mess around, HEY!”

The only counterweight on this plan, to me, (besides the fact that he used the word “I” instead of “We”) was the fact that it was likely to be glorious weather and we had talked previously about doing something else on our first free day together.  “What about finally taking the kayaks out; wasn’t that what we were hoping to do tomorrow?”  I ventured.  Not wanting to come off as a slovenly wife unconcerned about the condition of our residence, I nonetheless felt it was a matter of principle that we follow through on an idea that we had both enthusiastically supported before moving back in together:  leaving “stuff” behind once in a while and getting outside to do something active, really just for the sake of doing it.  So I dug in my heels.  We went back and forth for a while, tensely, neither one of us relishing the activity.

Fortunately, our dispute didn’t last very long, because we realized that, with a little attention to scheduling, we could do some of IMG_0463IMG_1849both:  not clean the whole house but focus on deciding, together, where the rugs would go; take the kayaks out to a nearby river and enjoy drifting past the quiet banks in a riot of fall colors.

Knowing that some part of my husband has missed being in church that morning, I tried not to press the point that Nature, on a sunny day in late September, offered a kind of spiritual refreshment, fulfilled something deep in the soul even.  We also didn’t talk about any debt ceilings out there.

That evening we could look back and see that we had in fact balanced our goals for the day pretty well.  Stalemate averted through negotiation, not capitulation.  Contrary to making me smug, however, the whole experience brought me closer to the turmoil in Washington, those figures frozen in mid-sentence.  Dig in your heels about anything deep enough, and you could be one of them.  If you have a spouse, best to turn to him or her and see where you need to make an adjustment.  If you have a whole country waiting, even more so.