Heart to Heart

Tips for Thriving in your Marriage

“We can train in rejoicing in even the smallest blessings our life holds. It is easy to miss our own good fortune; often happiness comes in ways we don’t even notice. It’s like a cartoon I saw of an astonished-looking man saying, ‘What was that?’ The caption below read, ‘Bob experiences a moment of well-being.’ The ordinariness of our good fortune is hard to catch.”

• Pema Chodron as quoted by Brian Johnson

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Rejoice in Small Blessings

Sometimes when I describe my life with my husband to other people I think to myself ‘wow, that sounds really boring!’ We cherish our routine of getting into bed together at night, take pleasure in being in the same room even if we aren’t talking to each other, laugh and say ‘we’ve been married too long!’ when we blurt out the same words at the same time.

These are silly little things – yet they aren’t. Getting into bed together at night is a “blessing” to us both since there were years when we were too angry at each other to create that pleasure. We feel fortunate for the stability of companionable silence after so many years of the opposite.

When we first decided to turn our relationship around we weren’t in a very good place at all – pain and anger still abounded. But we made a pact to actively seek out the good – and actively create good – in our relationship. We found, as Chodron suggests, that rejoicing in small blessings (wherever they may be found) was an excellent way to gain perspective and open our hearts to the healing we both needed.

© 2011 Melissa Orlov