Problem-Solving

If I were to write another book I believe it would be on the theme of: Little Things.  The importance of little things in our lives is of no little importance.  I often read the advice columns in the news media to discover what the current style and themes of casual counsel have taken.  They have changed several times in my lifetime, and have taken on greater depth through the decades, but they have through all the changes been taken by little things.  With reference to her vacation the author of a fine current newspaper column used notes sent to her from readers to fill the lines in this week’s series.  They refer to: poor communication to the person just diagnosed with cancer; judging others on what you manage easily; dealing with a nitpicker around the house; showing interest without being intrusive; getting both parents involved when there is a new baby in the home.  In another column in the same edition, a different counselor responded to a wife’s letter about being bugged by her husband’s fixation on her brother.  The fixation was honorable and complimentary to the brother, but causing ill response by the wife because of her brother’s childhood brutishness of her long ago.  Another column of a day or two past was occupied with the distress of a wife who, after thirty years of a continuing good marriage became jealous to serious point at seeing an old photograph of her husband, then single, perhaps at college age, appearing with a girlfriend in a normal and neutral context.  I wonder what would be modern counsel to David and or Michal, a husband and wife of some years, born of love and survived through harsh times on the run from King Saul, father of Michal.

After some years, David was ensconced as the King, and soon recovered the neglected Ark of the Covenant.  On returning to Jerusalem with joy, David publicly celebrated the event.  After the celebration, David went to Michal expecting to rejoice with her.  They argued intensely, David left, and never returned to her apartment.  Therefore Michal  . . . had no child unto the day of her death.  How could this have happened except for the recalcitrant attitudes over style of expression, dropping love from problem-solving between them?  Many human situations reducing or enhancing our happiness are found in little things: a slight from a friend or what is interpreted as a slight; a letter of love from someone loved or the lack of a letter; a smile or a frown; a raised voice or lilting in address; an invitation or lack of invitation; an oversight or effort to correct an oversight; a memory of a negative experience or the effort to create an affirmative experience; a polite gesture or evasion of consideration, and the listing of little things, made into big things seems endless.

Twin sisters became the most popular newspaper advice columnists (Dear Abby and Ann Landers) during the second half of the twentieth century.  They fell into a private feud, each feeling the other was infringing on the other’s territory.  After years of alienation they decided the whole matter was foolish, and in a few hours of conversation, exchange of family memories and their own feelings and experiences they were reunited and finished out their lives in a spirit of love and validation, of family and professional mutuality that became virtue to their lives.  The counsel they offered their millions of readers was, after lost mutual years, applied to their own lives.  Abby died of Alzheimer’s a few miles from where I live – in fame lost. The solutions of many of the troublesome, uncomfortable, life-sapping, even costly matters in our lives rest not in some mysterious solution, some professional assistance, some bolt of lightning, some lengthy procedure, but in basic knowledge and understanding.  We human beings are formed as sensitive, sometimes jealous, sometimes feeling inferior or superior, sometimes arbitrary and stupid, sometimes proud and overbearing – and the list lengthens.  Leaders begin by asking if we can do something about the violation of a basic fact: we and God are interested in loving relationships that contribute to well-being and worth in each other.  So we communicate, refusing to accept offense any further, and in good will, often in humor, solve the rift, addressing the weakness that generated a problem.  Some persons never learn the lightness of being that prepares the way for solutions and warm feelings for mankind.