Subscription
Enter your e-mail address to receive this newspaper column each weekday.
My strict privacy policy will keep your email address 100% safe and secure.
-
Faith
-
Attitudes and actions to carry into the New Year
31 Dec 2006 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
-
Do inter-faith marriages work? My girlfriend and I are from very different cultures…
17 Dec 2006 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
My girlfriend an I are from two very different faiths, and cultures, and race groups – but we do speak the same language! We met at work and we naturally kept our relationship quiet at first knowing that our respective families would probably disapprove of our association. After two years we have both met families on both sides and her family is more accepting of me than mine is of her. We (her family and my family) are not overly religious yet everyone warns us about marriage and says it will not work because of our many faith and cultural differences. What do you think?
I am sure there are many “inter-faith” couples who can testify to the pleasures and rewards, and the pain and the difficulties that accompany such marriages. While your faith may not seem important to you at present, matters of faith (and the contrasts between your faiths) are likely to be accentuated when weddings are planned, when babies are born and named, when schools are selected, and when children celebrate rites of passage.
Be cautious. Seek counsel from persons who represent each of your respective faiths. While all relationships are tough and require dedication, an interfaith, cross-cultural relationship might test the strength of even the most profound of romantic love.
-
Improve your day…
12 Dec 2006 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
Twelve ways to have a fulfilling day…
- Surrender the illusion of control you have over everyone you love.
- Trust your instincts when they point you toward doing something good for those who least expect it of you.
- Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ a lot.
- Look across the restaurant and then, having chosen someone, collude with your waiter to pay for that person’s meal. Ask the waiter not to identify who did it.
- Contact an old friend.
- Leave a few groceries on the steps of someone whom you know is in a hard place.
- Forgive your enemies.
- Carpool.
- Visit your next-door neighbors.
- Refuse to gossip.
- Pick up litter.
- Go the extra mile for someone who has hurt you in the past.
-
General principles for healthier committed relationships…
08 Oct 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
In relationships:
Toxic patterns, abuse, excessive use of alcohol, lying, anger, jealousy, infidelity, to name a few, seldom improve without intervention, but will only increase in intensity, without some form of disruption. Unless toxic, or destructive patterns are addressed, they will only grow.
Self-definition, being willing to declare who and what you are, and what you want from a relationship, will be a healthy exercise even if, at first, such action seems fraught with potential to ruin a relationship. Any relationship that demands a person “tone down” who and what they are, is probably not a healthy one.
Forgiveness is not based on who is wrong or right. The stronger partner, or the one with the insight that forgiveness is necessary, is the one who takes the initiative toward forgiving. Problems arise when one partner is always expected to be the one initiating forgiveness. In this case, a relationship is lacking equality, mutuality, and respect: something deeper is amiss.
Regular sexual activity is a vital part of any marriage, well beyond childbearing years, and ought to be as important to both persons, and as central to both persons as are the mutual planning of finances, the mutual support of the children’s education and as important for a couple as regular worship at church, temple or synagogue.
-
To improve your most intimate relationship, talk about the following:
07 Jul 2006 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
Give each other several days of notice before you sit down and answer these questions about your relationship.
Make brief notes before you talk. Agree to be completely silent while listening to each person respond to each question.
“Volatile” couples might choose to talk in a crowded restaurant where they are less likely to erupt!
Do not skip questions. Of course, couples without children will ignore the final question:
1. What have you been trying to tell me that I have not been hearing?
2. What am I already doing that you would you like me to do a lot more?
3. What am I doing that you would you like me to do a lot less (or never)?
4. What is important to you, that you might resist telling me, to avoid hurting my feelings? (What have I “trained” you not to talk about?)
5. What can I do to help you use more of your talents and be more fulfilled in life?
6. Is our intimate life (our sex life) all you want it to be?
7. What can I do to improve the quality of our intimate life?
8. In what ways do you think we might hold each other back (keep each other “down”)?
9. How can I be more responsible to you (not responsible “for” you) and responsive to you?
10. How do you think I could be a better parent?
-
-
-
Get Rod on FaceBook and/or Twitter
-
Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
-
Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
-
Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
-
Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
-
Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper.
Life inside the Smith household
-