Commitment Changes Perception — and Reality

There was a certain sentence in a book that I loved that expressed a thought I kept turning over in my mind, drawing sustenance and inspiration from it. When I thought it would be nice to go ahead and write about it, I went to the book to get the exact quote. My method is to visualize the page a given quote is on, roughly how far into the book it is, the shape of the paragraphs, whether there was an illustration, the relative positioning of the sentence in question. So I found the right page, but the quote wasn’t there. I saw the surrounding sentences, but realized I literally had read between the lines. The idea that inspired was not the direct work of the author but the result of my own inference or extrapolation, though it lived in my mind as an external “reality.”

And so it might well be with another line that has inspired me. It was in the film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, and in my mind one character said to another (and I can’t remember who), that you cannot truly know someone until you love them. I’ve looked for the exact line but can’t find it, and have no desire to re-watch the film, so I’m going with my memory, even though it’s possible no one actually said it. In love we don’t get hung up on the negatives, but “accentuate the positive.” For me, the best part of someone is their truest self. Or, less grandiosely, it is the self that makes the other parts forgivable, or, indeed, even amusing when the relationship is good. 

A corollary is that when we commit to someone or something the light in which we view the qualities of the other or the object changes. There is that dreadful way of deciding whether to commit to a relationship where you make two columns of the positives and negatives and then in theory you decide based on the relative length of the lists. No! Commit first and the entries on the list take on whole new meanings or relevance. The “bad” list could be long as your arm but irrelevant. Yes, there are times when the bad will ultimately show itself as outweighing the good, but you can only learn that the hard way, which is also the only way, by giving it a go and living through it. 

Which brings me to where this thread of thoughts started in my mind. We’re at our small studio condo in an Art Deco building in South Beach and loving it. The reason is because we have committed to keeping it. Okay, and we don’t have crazy South Florida tenants any more. But it’s been instructive to see how my internal dialogue has changed since we decided to stop the “should we sell it or should we keep it” soundtrack. That sliver of ocean view that I downplayed because it so small and only in the kitchen, I now play up as an OCEAN VIEW, because, well, it is an ocean view. That creek our building sits on that I discounted because it wasn’t the ocean I now embrace as a lovely BODY OF WATER that sparkles in the sun and even hosts manatees sometimes. The unit itself which was too small to stay in for any length of time is now JUST RIGHT since is easier to manage, forces you to live simply, and keeps the condo fees down. And South Beach itself, which can get crazy and loud, is now LIVELY and COSMOPOLITAN. And that garden with the banyan tree that anchors our enclave, well I never could find a way to make that one anything less than perfect. 

The upshot is partly that the nature of our self talk matters enormously in our happiness, but mostly that commitment makes the incentive for certain self talk greater, which with time has the favorable result of turning what was subjective into the simple truth. Our commitment renders the infinity of options that always are there for us as merely interesting things to think about, creative speculations, rather than temptations or sources of confusion that cause us to lose sleep at night.