Thankful for....The ability to compromise

Hello all,

Here in Japan it is Thanksgiving-eve.

I was peering into my refrigerator just now, staring at the slowly defrosting micro-turkeys, and I had a thought.

Celebrating Thanksgiving in Japan, as a person from a Thanksgiving-celebrating country, is all about compromise.

You have to be willing to compromise, and to accept that you will not get everything you want just because you feel it is necesssary for your celebration.

Turkey, for example, isn't an everyday item here in Japan. Many Japanese people I know aren't even quite sure what a turkey is.   Luckily this year we were able to get 2 fairly small turkeys from the online Brazilian store.  Last year I had to substitute chicken for turkey.

Green Bean casserole requires shopping at a minimum of 3 different stores (with no guarantee you'll come away with the ingredients needed).  This year I was able to procure Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup.  Last year I wasn't able to find it and tried making a similar casserole using instant Knorr Kinoko Mushroom soup.  It was  tolerable. Enough said.

But even more important than the food is  the fact that celebrating Thanksgiving in another country means being away from all the family with whom you usually gather.  

Dealing with these things and more means making a choice:  to compromise and work around the challenges, or to give up and not celebrate.

We choose to compromise.

I'll make chicken instead of turkey.
I'll try to find an alternative to Campbells in my green bean casserole.
And we'll invite friends  over for a potluck, to share the spirit of togetherness even while all of us are missing people who are far away.

I've lived in Japan multiple times, so I am well accustomed to compromising.  I adjust recipes and experiment with other ingredients when I can't find the ones that would normally be so easily accessible in California.    I not only think outside the box--I AM outside the box.

But I think there is a deeper point here.

Every day I read the news from the United States online.  I read the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.   I check  Facebook throughout the day.

And I realized something very frightening--

People don't know how to compromise.  At all.

The Macmillan Dictionary defines compromise as  "to solve a problem or end an argument by accepting that you cannot have everything that you want."   I looked up the word "compromise" in the Oxford Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which each defined compromise, in variously more flowery terms, in the same manner.

People don't know how accept not getting everything they want.

And I'm not sure how this happened.  Perhaps our culture of instantaneous Internet information and immediate gratification otherwise had something to do with it.  Perhaps not.

No one gets everything they want.  Ever.  It never happens.  It is the root of human nature to always want more.  To always want to go beyond what you have.  And whether this manifests itself in admirable courage to not give up on a quest or a dream, or whether it just deteriorates into greed and closed-minded ranting, it's the same thing.

No one gets everything they want.

But if this is true (which it is), then why all the hate?

Facebook is loaded with it.  GIF's and memes and shared articles and links and ranting and ranting and RANTING.

The news is loaded with it too.  Op-Ed diatribes and fast-breaking news stories about people shooting each other full of holes because the shooter didn't like who the shootee voted for.

Aaaagh.

So here in my little bubble of distance, I'm going to be thankful that somehow I learned the right lessons, and I will hope and pray and meditate upon the notion that perhaps Patrick and Aya are learning the right lessons as well.

That we do not get everything that we want.

That compromise is a vital part of life, and that every minute of every day requires making choices that involve weighing between two or more options.

Most importantly, that just because YOU can't have everything that YOU want, does not give you the right, power or justification to impose your choices on others.


It's about compromise.

And in the end, I'd rather have to make compromises in my life  than  to not be able to make any choices at all.


Happy Thanksgiving.

Until later...

Madness I tell you. Madness

Hello all...

I am doing it again.
I know, I know....
It's insane.  It's ludicrous.
It is something for which I have neither the time nor the luxury of even doing a good job of it.

But I'm doing it anyway.

I'm doing Nanowrimo again.

Nanowrimo stands for "National Novel Writing Month", and occurs every November.
It's quite simple really.

One sits down at a computer or in front of a thick notebook on November 1st and begins writing a novel.

One writes between 1700-2000 words per day.

And by November 30th one must have achieved at least 50,000 words.

I did Nanowrimo last year (and completed it I might add), and I found that the trick to reaching 50,000 words was to turn my inner editor off.

Usually as I write I'm constantly reviewing what I wrote, correcting it, messing with how the words sound and look and feel.  I spend quite a bit of time rewriting and reinventing whole swaths of what I write.

But to reach 50,000 words in one month, I found that I have to abandon this type of as-I-go polishing, and just let all the words spew forth from my fingertips.  I cannot allow myself to touch the awkward sentences, misplaced modifiers, imprecise adjectives or faulty character traits.

I know it sounds easy, but for a rather neurotic closet perfectionist such as myself, it's a lot harder than it seems.

My house may be cluttered, my clothes wrinkly and my shelves dusty, but gosh darn it all, my writing is as shiny and clear as a shard of polished crystal.

....well, in my mind at least.

Aside from Nanowrimo, we are dropping back into Fall/Winter here in Kyoto.  Bob's mom returned to California on Monday after a whirlwind and lovely 3 week visit.  And just days after she left, winter started to tiptoe back into our lives.

And so, the thick blankets are back on the beds, the fans are being returned to the attic and the house is once again chilly enough to warrant multiple layers of clothing.  Too soon we will be plugging back in our kotatsus and huddling in front of yen-guzzling space heaters.

Time flows too fast folks.  Was it just a few weeks ago I was griping about the heat?  Pah.

Until next time.....