I’ve a particularly strong conviction about The Ball: it’s always in your court. Always. This is true in weighty matters and less important things, in conflict and in peace, in personal issues and professional ones. The ball is always in your court.

Let’s start with conflict. If you’re upset about something—hurt or angry or otherwise—the ball is in your court. In fact, it is your responsibility to bring up your hurt with whomever has hurt you. This is important for so many reasons. First of all, no one can fully read your mind or heart. No matter how close that person may be to you. No matter how long you’ve known each other. People fail each other. Your best friend will fail you. Your spouse will fail you. Your sibling will fail you. And you will fail the people around you. You already have and will continue to! (Let’s just take a collective deep breath and claim this reality; it’s the only sincere and productive starting point.) So do something about your hurt: tell the person who hurt you. Ask him to listen and tell him. Without taking this action, you risk allowing the hurt or anger to fester and grow beyond the original wound. And to the extent that the wound grows because of neglect, to that extent it is your own self-wounding. It becomes difficult to parse out and see clearly. It’s infected and no longer within the other person’s ability to fully soothe.

Without taking initiative in hurt, you are also not giving the other person the opportunity to listen, apologize, and repent. By passively waiting on the other person to instinctively read your mind and know your hurt (and by relishing your position of relational and emotional power–eek!), you do not assume that she loves you and wants the best for your relationship. Think about this! Dignify the person who has hurt you by giving her the opportunity to change! Honor your relationship with the other person by letting her see where she has hurt you, by letting her love you better!

What about conflict in which someone intentionally hurts you? Because he or she doesn’t care about you? I would venture to say this is a very rare case, so be slow to reach this conclusion. But let’s say it’s clear—an intentional wounding. Welp, the ball is still in your court. If you desire resolution, you’ve gotta grab the bull by the horns and confront it. If you don’t care about that relationship, fine. You don’t have to do anything. But you can’t actively hang on to the offense if you’re not willing to go to the offender with it. If it’s a water-on-a-duck’s-back situation for you, great. Shake the muck from your little webbed feet and move on. But if you’re gonna stew about it (and don’t kid yourself about whether you’ve let something go or not), you gotta go back and confront that sh*t.

Moving on a bit to something lighter: Making and maintaining new friends. The ball is always in your court. There’s a neighbor I’ve been wanting to get to know. She travels a lot, so she’s hard to pin down, but darn it if I don’t keep inviting her to things—morning coffee, wine on the porch, craft night. She hasn’t been able to come so far. It’s tempting to feel like she’s uninterested or simply like I’m coming on too strong. But if I want to get to know her, if I want us to be friends, the ball is in my court! If she’s actually uninterested, she can keep saying no, and I don’t believe in coming on too strong: people want to be desired. I may eventually choose to stop pursuing her, but that’s my own choice and my own responsibility. Because the ball is always mine.

Hmm…what else. Oh yeah. My friend Sarah is applying for a job and was told she’d hear something within a certain timeframe. She didn’t. Should she wait to contact the company, so as not to pester or sound too eager? NO! She shouldn’t! Because the ball is in her court!!! (Did you contact them, Sarah??)

The handy thing about all of this is that there’s only one thing to remember. It’s not nuanced. It’s not hard to figure out whose job is what or what to do or not do. The rule is simple and easy to recall: The Ball Is Always in Your Court. And you guys: this truth is freeing! It means you can do something about what you desire! You’re not at the mercy of someone else to take action! You have a lot more jurisdiction in your life than you might imagine. Whoop whoop!

There’s more to say. Always. About everything. But I gotta wrap this up. Maybe I’ll share a story about my own ball-lobbing in the next couple days. The results were unexpected and wonderful.

Welp, I missed last week, as I went out of town on Wednesday. I did my darndest to fit in a few minutes to write SOMEthing, but trip prep overtook that time. Everything in me today wanted to just pack up the kids and go to Costco–basically just spin my errand wheels to get through the day–but I’m making myself (with Moomers’ childcare help) sit and delve in again.

I’m writing about the notion of being offended. It’s something I’ve mulled over for a while, and now that I’m sitting down to parse it out, I’m realizing how vast and touchy a subject it is to cover. I’m up for the task. Because I care about it a lot. But it’s a doozy.  Here’s hoping I can have something by next Wednesday!

Back to the work…

First of all, at their least insidious, disclaimers are BORING. They are just. so. boring. We feel compelled to use them, but no one wants to hear them! Because they’re boring. And a literal waste of time. When Al writes a new song, I’m often one of the privileged first listeners. But when she’s ready to present and must first list the reasons one or I might critique the song (because that’s what a disclaimer is—anticipation of imagined potential critique), I’m booooored. I just want to hear the song! I’m excited for it! I’m ready! I’m an eager supporter, and each disclaimer is a boring little fly I have to swat aside to get to the goods.

Moomers has been developing her own brand of disclaimer that I particularly enjoy pointing out. When showing me the new shirt she got at J. Jill: “It’s not the most aMAZing top in the world, but I like it.” When offering me some of the pimento cheese she bought at the farmers’ market: “It’s not the most aMAZing pimento cheese in the world, but it’s good.” When telling me about the recent Dolores Hydock play she saw: “It wasn’t the most aMAZing play in the world, but it was entertaining.” I guess my bar can be pretty high. I’ve been known to turn over a cafe table or two at sub-most-amazing-in-the-world pimento cheese.

So disclaimers are boring (or in Moomers’ case a little endearing). Boring happens in life, though, and people can deal with boring if they have to. But disclaimers can also be harmful.

My Senior year of college I took a Shakespeare class. One of our assignments was to memorize a sonnet, recite it in front of the class, and verbally explicate it. (As an aside, I unwittingly chose a sonnet about semen, so that was cool.) When it was my turn, I got up and immediately said something about how I felt underprepared and that my presentation probably wasn’t going to be that good. My professor stopped me and said, very pointedly, though not unkindly, “Don’t ever do that again. Because you’re probably going to do a fine job. But you basically said that however good of job you do isn’t really good enough, and how do you think that makes your classmates feel?”

I had never thought about the nature of disclaimers before that interaction, but Dr. Davis was right, and I’m very thankful to him. Disclaimers are inherently judgmental. It’s one thing for Al, who is the only one of us writing a song, to give a boring disclaimer to me, but if there were a group of songwriters sharing their work, and Al led her song with disclaimers, she would be inherently judging the work of everyone else in the group. She would be setting a bar, and even though she would claim her own song didn’t reach the bar, the bar would remain, nonetheless, for everyone else.

I see this bar set all the time on Instagram. We feel compelled to mention the mess in the background or the baby weight we still carry or the makeup we don’t yet have on. Setting bars left and right for ourselves and everyone else. We do it so involuntarily we don’t even think about it. We almost can’t not do it.

Why are we thus compelled?? Why do we need to anticipate and acknowledge imagined potential critique? Maybe we believe that other people are actually judging us. And maybe they are. I think it’s likely that if we imagine others to be judging us, we are judging others in the same ways. Our own judging is probably the best evidence we have that we ourselves are being judged. Maybe we feel compelled to anticipate potential critique because we don’t want to appear naive or unaware of our imperfections and insufficiencies. We may not reach our own standards, but at least we know what good standards are. Our good taste is one thing we’ve got going for us. Maybe we’re compelled to name potential critiques because we don’t truly accept the reality of our own imperfections. If we accepted them, I don’t think we would feel the need to even mention them. If we had some peace with the imperfection of things, they wouldn’t be worth our notice or attention.

The root of the disclaimer is pride. The idea that we should look better than we do, that our work should be flawless, that our houses should be cleaner than they are is laughable. We’re people. Yes, we’re made in God’s image as creative beings, and there are eternally significant ways in which great worth has been bestowed upon us, but also, we’re all dumb little people. Even the most esteemed among us. I’m confident that our sense of what perfection is is so incredibly imperfect in the eyes of God. None of us even have a clue.

There’s tons of freedom to be had when we believe in and accept the “insufficiency that one day [we] will have to discover” (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain). Giving disclaimers is a way to keep that discovery and acceptance at bay, and so we prolong the harm of prideful self-deception and judgment of the people around us. So let’s just do our thing, whatever our thing is at the moment. And not take ourselves too seriously. Let’s stop being boring, and let’s work on removing arbitrary bars constructed by human judgment.

DOWN WITH DISCLAIMERS!!!

Sarah

P.S. In an effort to avoid giving disclaimers, don’t lead with, “OK I’m not gonna give any disclaimers, I’m just gonna jump right in,” because you just gave every possible disclaimer you could have in one fell swoop, and you know it. 🙂

Here I am. My first day of writing. My goal is to take 1.5-2 hours each Wednesday to get away by myself, during the day (this is key), to write. Moomers* always says that “work expands to fill the time allotted,” and I’m hoping that work constricts to fill the time allotted, too.

I’m writing for these reasons: There have been several times over the last year or two when I’ve thought to myself, “I want to write an essay about [fill in the blank],” and I’ve never gone beyond forming loose outlines in my mind. This thought comes when I’m working through something in my brain—something that is troubling me—and I really feel the need to get all of it out on paper and maybe, in that process, distill some conclusions or definitive thoughts. My own definitive thoughts. Something somewhat succinct. For example, I experience almost constant angst around my cell phone. I want to spell out the conflicting thoughts and impulses that create this inner grind, and I want to share them with those I love! In essay form! I want to understand better my own habits and practices, and I want to open wide that conversation and facilitate understanding between humans, most of whom I imagine have complicated relationships with their devices as well.

Another reason I want to write is that I’ve been realizing how important communication is to me. I am passionate about communication. And I can tell you that, as a Nine on the enneagram, it’s not easy for me to name things I’m passionate about. To see and name them. But this has become clear to me: I’m passionate about communication, interpersonal and professional. (The professional world is largely unknown to me, but my hunch is that there’s quite a lot of overlap between the professional and personal spheres regarding healthy communication.) Gaining better communication skills literally saved my relationship with Chris and allowed us to move into marriage with a measure of confidence and peace we had not known before. I can survey the last 10 years and see how, slowly but surely, I’ve been putting these skills to use more broadly—beyond my marital relationship. I’ve pushed myself. I’ve practiced and exercised this muscle, and its gotten stronger. It’s easy to feel like I’m only beginning this journey of exploring and employing solid, productive communication with people, but, really, I’ve been on this path for at least a little while. And I now see it as such: a real path under my feet and one that I very much want to continue on.

Lastly, my beloved sister said I should write more. And that meant a whole lot to me. She’s a writer—a song writer—with an emphasis on powerful and insightful lyrics. For her to tell me that I should write more and that I’m good at it sealed the deal for me. Okay, God. I mean Al. Okay, Al. Speak the word only and my blog shall be started.

Now I will brainstorm some of the topics I want and hope to cover in my writing. I had planned to create a private document for this list, but why not share it, now I wonder. Welcome to the process. In no particular order:

-Cell phones

-Defensiveness

-Instagram

-The idea of being offended

-The idea of boundaries

-Disclaimers

-Listening

-Being forward

While I intend to have time each week to write, I’m confident I won’t be able to churn out a completed post as often. My goal will be to post something each week, though, even if just a brief writing update or pertinent anecdote.

Alright, time to go get those sweet kiddies of mine from Moomers’** house…

Sarah

*My mom

**My mom’s