Note to God

Here are ten pieces of relationship advice that everyone needs to hear:  1. Never keep score in love. Scoreboards are for sports games, not marriages.  2. Maintain interests and passions separate from your partner’s. Marriage should not be the end of individuality. 3. It can’t always be fifty-fifty. Sometimes it will be ninety-ten; sometimes it will be ten-ninety. All that matters is that it adds up to one hundred. 4. One man said, “Never stop dating. I’m ninety-nine and still courting my wife!” Marriages don’t get boring; you stop trying. 5. No one has ever argued their way to a happy marriage. When facing a challenge, face it together.  6. You cannot take care of your partner if you aren’t taking care of yourself. Make a list of your daily needs to feel good and have your partner do the same. Make sure you and your partner are able to do the things on that list.  7. Never involve nonprofessional third parties (parents, friends, siblings, coworkers) in disagreements...

John henry newman The Mass and Modernity: Walking to Heaven Backward, that describes the process of learning and spiritual growth as a journey where one often makes mistakes and experiences setbacks before finding truth. It signifies that progress towards spiritual understanding is not always a direct, linear path, but rather involves a process of trial and error, learning from mistakes and false starts.  We advance to the truth by experience of error; we succeed through failures. We know not how to do right except by having done wrong. We call virtue a mean,—that is, as considering it to lie between things that are wrong. We know what is right, not positively, but negatively;—we do not see the truth at once and make towards it, but we fall upon and try error, and find it is not the truth. We grope about by touch, not by sight, and so by a miserable experience exhaust the possible modes of acting till naught is left, but truth, remaining. Such is the process by which we succeed; we...

May integrity and uprightness protect me,     because my hope, Lord,[c] is in you.

1 Keep me safe, my God,     for in you I take refuge. 2 I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;     apart from you I have no good thing.” [...] 5 Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;     you make my lot secure. [...] 7 I will praise the Lord, who counsels me;     even at night my heart instructs me. 8 I keep my eyes always on the Lord.     With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken. 9 Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;     my body also will rest secure, 10 because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,     nor will you let your faithful[b] one see decay. 11 You make known to me the path of life;     you will fill me with joy in your presence,     with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

While his piece was intended as a humorous critique of bureaucratic inefficiency, the principle is applicable to a range of situations, from personal time management to large-scale projects. The generalized insight rings true: Have all day to process email and you end up emailing for the entire day. Have thirty minutes to process email and you crank through your entire inbox in a flash. Have months to complete an assignment and you procrastinate enough for the assignment to take months. Have two days to complete an assignment and you work efficiently and get it done. Open time frames lead to a lot of movement and very little progress—the rocking-horse phenomenon of busywork culture. We tend to be more efficient and productive when constraints come into play. We also tend to focus on the important when pressed for time. You can leverage Parkinson’s law to be more efficient and effective in your professional and personal life:  -  Establish time blocks that are shorter than yo...