Consistency

There’s a blog post I stumbled across a little while back that resonated with me. The Grand Canyon is a sort of classic example of this. J-Dubs has tweeted about it in the form of Trust, which is a pretty powerful form of Greatness. …but mostly, it reminded me of one of my high school English teachers.

Mr. Kerwin was one of the best teachers I ever had. One time he talked about love. Specifically, he talked about his relationship with his wife - what characterized it, what made it solid, made it “last”. He described it thus: Every morning he woke up and made the conscious decision “I am going to be with this woman.” That was it. That was The Whole Thing.

While I’ve come to recognize its beautiful simplicity, this wasn’t exactly an easy lesson for a 17-year-old to swallow. In fact I’d say the class - more-or-less to a person - was agin’ him (myself included). Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a subtlety about the difference between “falling in love” and what it takes to maintain a relationship with someone For Life that is lost on a bunch of teenagers. One way of looking at this is that Mr. Kerwin should’ve perhaps read his audience a little better. …but maybe the fact that I’m still talking about it over 20 years later tells a different story, teaches a different lesson.

Anyhow, what Mr. Kerwin didn’t talk about: how to get started. Largely because he didn’t have to. He had a built-in, socially-normative, and well- understood starting point (to wit: saying “I Do.”) So…how does one get started on Greatness? Well…there’s the hard part, Gentle Reader. I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer for you there. I don’t know what form Your Greatness might take. That’s the part you need to figure out for yourself.

…and when you do figure it out, you go Do It. Consistently. :-)