Don't Go Changing

I never was much of a fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but more than a few times in my life I have been fond of quoting his rationale for changing your mind: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." Whenever anyone goes from Point A to Anti-Point A, they seem to think Emerson's quote justifies the shift, and I am no exception. (Mind you, it seems to me that if Emerson was really right, then he probably didn't feel the same way a year later. But that's another issue.)

I'm thinking about this because I believe I am driving Linda crazy by saying one thing and doing another - again and again and again. Just yesterday around noon we discussed whether we should pot some plants we had bought, and I said it made more sense to do it at the end of the afternoon when it was cooler.

So Linda proceeded to start doing other tasks, and I played online poker. But after about 30 minutes, I was bored (which means "not winning" when playing poker) so I walked out and told her I was going to pot the plants. She looked so frustrated and told me she wanted to be involved because there were things she waned to do with some of them, and she wouldn't have started what she was doing if she'd known I was going to change my mind so quickly.

Fair call, but I am quite used to changing my mind. I don't think this is a getting-older thing for me. I seem to recall changing my mind a lot when I ran the company. Lots of it wasn't really changing my mind, of course. It was forgetting what I had said earlier and saying something different later.

But when you're "The Boss", people put up with you changing your mind. And when you decide their annual raises, they seldom point out you are an inconsistent twit. Sure, they grumble and undoubtedly call you nasty names behind your back. But if on Monday you say Do This and say Don't Do This on Friday, they seldom argue. Mind you, the smart ones know that gives them a perfect choice to do whichever they want to do, because they can always say, "But you told me you wanted this..."

While changing your mind works when you're "The Boss", it's a bit different when I am home and clearly "Not The Boss". Let's just say that Linda laid out a clear, convincing case point by point explaining why I am inconsistent and not particularly helpful when I do this.

But Linda goes beyond explaining why my inconsistency is annoying. If it were only that, it would just be a meaningless little spat. Where she excels is that she uses the opportunity to train me. It's almost as if looking ahead to the many years we spend together when both of us are retired, she knows she must change whatever I do when I drive her crazy or she is likely to - er - go crazy.

It's all kind of like the way we handle the remote control for the TV. Although she slipped up once and let me see that she really did know how to use it, standard procedure calls for me to check the listings, set the recordings, and otherwise choose the channels we watch. In one sense, I am in charge - I control the clicker. But funny enough, it's only lately that I realize the shows I am choosing are almost exclusively cooking and home development. Somewhere along the line, without even being aware of it, I have been trained.

And yesterday I learned it was my inconsistency that was the real hobgoblin of a little mind. Oh, don't get me wrong. She offered me the choice of going ahead with what I was thinking of doing or waiting for her to be ready.

I used the time to start writing this post.