Suppose you have a little kerfuffle with your spouse over some issue. You think she's not going to use the new XYZ, and she insists she is. You feel it will go to waste, but she promises she won't let it.
Six months later you discover you were right: the XYZ sits unused on the shelf. Some possible reactions:
1) Resentment. "Why am I with that kind of person?"
2) Resigned acceptance. "It sucks, but I might as well not poison myself with resentment."
3) Forgiveness. "I forgive her for her flaws."
4) Gratitude. "I'm so happy she's exactly the way she is!"
These are increasingly healthy attitudes. Number four is of course the hardest, and may even sound strange and counterintuitive if you've never given it an honest shot.
If you have given it a try, you might discover interesting things happening. Maybe your spouse picks up on your love, and this actually changes her. How wonderful!
But there's still a surprising amount of subtlety here. For example: given my expectations about how the world works, I know there are limits on how much my gratitude can accomplish. For example, it can only change her if it influences my behavior in some way that she can detect. My smile, or tone of voice, or pheromones, or whatever. There has to be some physical mechanism. That's just how the world works.
But what if I don't have any deep-seated expectations about how much my gratitude can accomplish? No requirement that it must work via some discoverable mechanism? What if I one day decided to drop that requirement? And what if the result were -- somehow -- to open up a level of love that was not accessible when I placed subtle subconscious limits on it?
Well that just sounds crazy.
But what if?
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