This is day. 3229 what only time can reveal?
I've come to realize that some of the most important things in life cannot be discovered quickly.
We live in a world where we are encouraged to make selections based on a list of attributes. We interview people for jobs evaluate potential business partners. We choose friends and sometimes select romantic relationships based on a collection of characteristics that we believe are important.
aka the dating app
we create our list compare the options and make our decision.
The problem is that the qualities that matter most rarely appear on that list.
Consider character, for example, how do you really know if someone has good character they can tell you they are honest loyal Dependable trustworthy blah blah. They might even have an impressive history that seems to demonstrate those qualities.
However, character is not something that you can declare. It is something that is revealed through repeated Behavior particularly when circumstances become difficult.
Trust works much the same way. We do not really build trust through a single Grand gesture. We build it through hundreds of small interactions.
Someone says they will do something and then they do it they make a promise and they keep it they make a mistake and admit it over time these small moments accumulated until we have something that we can trust.
It was never created in one moment. It was built through repetition.
Compatibility is perhaps even more interesting. We often think that compatibility is about shared interests.
Similar personalities are common goals if that was the case my wife and I would have never stayed married.
Those things certainly matter but real compatibilities discovered in the ordinary moments of Life. How did two people respond to disappointment?
How do they navigate disagreement what happens when both people are tired frustrating or facing uncertainty? These are not questions that can be answered on a questionnaire.
Of course, we should be careful about turning this observation of some sort of universal formula.
Every relationship is different and time alone does not guarantee a positive outcome.
Repetition can be can reveal trouble patterns such as easily as just as easily as admirable ones. Sometimes a single action tells us everything that we need to know.
What I find interesting is how closely this lines with my own commitments.
I spend years trying to understand the power of doing Small Things consistently. I usually think about this in terms of personal Improvement, but perhaps the same principle applies to how we understand other people.
We are all revealing who we are every single day through the things that we that we repeatedly do.
Perhaps the best question is not whether someone possesses the qualities we admire but whether those qualities consistently appear in their actions.
And perhaps we should start by asking that question of our own cells.