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Helen Hawersaat's avatar

Listen, all I can read right now is P.G. Wodehouse and The Penderwicks. Sorry WRM friends, I’m just not doing it!

I could also use a day or two to just lie in bed and watch TV, ideals be damned. How about I listen to audiobooks of P.G. Wodehouse? Is that better?

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Gina's avatar

I think about those gaps between my ideals and my lived reality alllll the time, and tend to think of them as being the core of where spiritual growth can happen, if I let it. I guess I have the opposite tendency to you, in that I’m very inclined to just let myself off with characteristic self-indulgence - but finding the sweet spot between pushing myself to live out my values in a tangible way, whilst also having the humility to recognise that I am much more limited than I’d like to believe, seems to be the never ending spiritual battle of my life.

I haven’t looked at those links and will check them out, but your reflection on extended family really resonated! One of the things I am always saying to myself and others is that if we want this “village” we’re always going on about then we have to accept the frustrations we have with the people who make it up. It’s a contradiction to say we want a village and then say we want it to be made up of people who exactly meet our Village Member criteria. And like you say, it is a really important value to model for children, to be in relationship with extended family and to love them in spite of often deep differences, annoyances, hurts etc. (I think about it a lot, but I am still terrible at it - I spend an extraordinary amount of time expressing my incredulity at various extended family members. Must get to Confession 🥴)

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