Sunday, September 4, 2011

Today's fortune: September 4, 2011

Today's fortune: You have a natural grace and great consideration for others.

Before we begin, let's turn to Dictionary.com for a definition of that critical word, "Grace" - Elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion or action; favor or goodwill; mercy, clemency or pardon.

As a spittin', scratchin', fartin' regular joe, I don't display much grace on a daily basis.

But perhaps grace can be attained. And maybe the key to unlocking grace lies in the second half of this fortune. Can "great consideration for others" help one achieve grace?

I think so. This fortune brings to mind a psychology class I took in high school. It was a good class, in part because the teacher let us watch Cool Hand Luke, one of my favorite movies of all time and a psychological case study of there ever was one. (The teacher, however, fast-forwarded through the best scene of the movie. You know the one I'm talking about. Lucille? Uh huh.)

In the psychology class, the teacher one day asked us a question: who interrupts people more, men or women? The correct answer is men, by a large margin, and most people in the class guessed correctly. I guessed women, my logic being that women seemed to talk more than men and therefore must interrupt more.

But as we were discussing the topic in class, I was proven wrong when I interrupted a female classmate. It was eye-opening for me, and from that moment on I came to see that men truly do interrupt women a lot. Men in general have a terrific lack of consideration for women when it comes to conversations.

I'm going to try something. For the next week, and hopefully longer, I'm going to try to restrain myself from interrupting people. This is going to be harder than it may seem. Interruptions occur naturally in speech, and I talk to people all day long at work. But I'm going to let my widget customers, my co-workers, my family and, especially, my wife finish their thoughts this week.

At the end of the week, I may be able to count myself a little more graceful.

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