The Benefit of Saying ‘Yes’ to Love Later in Life - Part 1 (episode 293-1)
Like he says, age is just a number and many people live that in their relationships.
Think Cher, Carol Burnett, Madonna, President Macron and plenty of others. People adopt that philosophy because they have learned firsthand that it’s true. Mark Sparrow is one such person as he married for the first time in his 60’s, a man many years his junior. He had to quiet the voices in his head that brought judgment, the ‘what would people think’ fear, and a lot of ‘shoulds’. Age difference doesn’t have to be a thing, Mark shares. Knowing love is a wondrous thing and well worth the risk. “Once your heart becomes involved, it becomes much clearer.” Spoken like someone in love. Ah yes.
Mark Sparrow is our guest this week for Permission to Want More: What’s Next and What’s Left. This is part one of our conversation.
Resilient. Loyal. Curious.
— Mark Sparrow
Breaking Up with Should
Thoughts from The Benefit of Saying ‘Yes” Later in Life
I don’t typically prayer before I write a blog, and just now I started to think, Well maybe I should. And that’s funny because I wrote down a quick note to myself an hour ago that said, Blog: Should I? I find that amusing. So a quick prayer later, here we are. Yes, let’s dive into should.
Mark and I talked about how when we straddle ourselves with a lot of ‘shoulds’ and ‘should-nots’ we find ourselves in a land of guilt, disappointment, criticism, heaviness and feeling bad. We tend to ruminate in what we didn’t do, and what other choice we might have made. Notice how much lighter ‘might have made’ feels than ‘should have.’
The definition of should: used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone's actions.
The shoulds can center around you or they can center around what you think of others. Here’s the tricky part. Often when we assign what someone else should have done, they likely do not have any idea they should have. The same would apply to the should nots. (This gets into expectations and communication which is actually an important part of this process, if you want it to be successful and healthy. This part is quite overlooked but we’ll save that portion for another day.)
We are likely requiring, usually in our heads, someone else to do, or be, a certain way. Or we think we have an obligation to do, or be, a certain way. Since most of us aren’t mind-readers this little experiment is likely to fail. When it comes to us we tend to use the shoulds as a weapon of feeling bad about ourselves for not having reached a particular goal.
Since the shoulds (and should nots) are rarely helpful or productive, what if we replace it with something that is?
What if you use the term ‘could’ instead? This helps us feel like we have ownership, we have choice, that there are options. But what about true real-life obligations I can hear someone asking me? I think this works better for those too. Instead of I should eat more vegetables which feels like a demand, I could eat more vegetables. I would be far more likely to eat some green beans under those circumstances. I really should exercise every day. Yikes! Feels heavy before I even start. How about, I could exercise every day. Then watch out, because I am going to put on some good music and dance in the kitchen. It counts and it’s fun.
We can even take this next level. My favorite version of a responsibility or an endeavor is to say, I get to. I get to eat salad! I get to dance in my kitchen. I get to! I’m not at all the first one to notice that the attitude you bring to whatever you are doing, or however you are being, makes a huge difference. The best example of this that I’ve ever seen is with Ted Knight who played Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Watch this clip and tell me how you really can go from should to could to get to.
It will change your life.
You get to decide how you see things. That will make all the difference in how you show up.
— The Escher Museum, picture of a chandelier and its reflection
