Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Our life is like a garden, our thoughts are the seeds, we can grow flowers, or we can grow weeds. Unknown.

As I walked my dog this morning, I looked at the blooming trees, flowers, the mowed and unmowed lawns. Some homes are lovingly tended, some are left completely alone, no plantings, and no flowers. The builder put in a tree and the City has planted trees, so it is not as bare as it could be.

In the park, there’s a baseball diamond and a soccer field, a play area for kids, and a new area of small trees have been planted.  The City is bothering to make a nice park and it gets used a lot. Most any night of the week in the summer we can walk and see a baseball game, soccer game, and children playing. Someone has to bother for all this to happen.

Someone has to bother to coach soccer and baseball. Parents have to bother to take their children to the park. We even have to bother to walk our dogs. When trees, flowers, shrubs get planted someone has to do it.

If we want to get more out of life, we have to put more into it, seems to be a truth. We can’t reap what we didn’t sow.  The spring and summer bulbs that didn’t get planted last fall were popped into the earth this spring. I think they will only be fertilizer. They don’t appear to be growing.

By not bothering to plant my bulbs last year I wasted money buying them, and they won’t add to my garden. If I don’t get any vegetables planted I won’t be reaping any later on.

I was listening to a talk on Sunday. The speaker was saying his mother always planted impatiens, and one year she called him saying something else was growing where she planted her impatiens. He looked at what he was pretty sure were corn plants in his mother’s flower pots. “I think you have corn growing. Tell me exactly what you did.”

“Well,” his mother said, “I didn’t have any vermiculite so I popped popcorn and used it in my pots.

“So mom, you planted corn. You must have had some unpopped corn and it grew. You got what you planted.”

Even when we don’t want to believe we planted it, a lot of times we get what we planted. We’ve sown the seeds of discontent, jealousy, strife, envy, greed. We might not have known it was what we were doing, but we did it, and we need to be careful that we plant what we want to reap. We can start by sowing kindness, forgiveness, understanding, encouragement, health, and fitness.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? If we sow strife, we will reap strife, and if we sow kindness we will reap kindness. If things aren’t working out in our relationships we need to take a better look at what we’ve been sowing. We may have told our self we were being kind, understanding, and empathetic but we were instead controlling. We may have thought we were sowing seeds of health and fitness but really we were belittling and criticizing. We may have thought we were encouraging but we might have made people feel small and insignificant because of our unrealistic expectations.

Once we figured out that we could not change the other, we became free to celebrate ourselves as we are. H. Dean Rutherford

We don’t always realize what seeds we are sowing. If we aren’t happy with the results we are getting we better take a closer look at what we are planting. Are we sarcastic, do our eyes roll sometimes, are we critical, are we defensive, or do we stonewall (emotionally withdraw from our partner)?

These seeds of criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling are the number one predictor of divorce according to John Gottman from the Gottman Institute. These actions are what John Gottman calls “the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

If we take a good hard look at our marriage and realize some of these have grown in our own marriage, we need to start pulling these weeds before they take over.

Seven things we can to do to keep contempt in check.

Realize delivery is everything. It isn’t what we say; it’s how we say it. Contempt often comes in the form of eye-rolling, snickering, name calling, laughing at instead of with our partner. It erodes the trust and safety in our relationships and is like a slow death or water torture, drip, drip, drip. We need to be cognizant of the message we are delivering by what we say and what we do.

Ban the word “whatever” from our vocabulary. When we say “whatever” we are basically saying we are not going to listen to them. We are telling them they are not important enough to listen to. This isn’t the message we want or should want to send.

We need to stay clear of sarcasm and mean-spirited jokes. When we make jokes at our partner’s expense we are tearing them down instead of building them up.

Don’t live in the past. Acknowledge valid complaints our partner has about us. Often we start showing contempt because we have let little things build up. We need to deal with our issues, some of which we will never be able to solve. Sometimes we will have to agree to disagree.

Watch our body language. Rolling our eyes and smirking is a signal our relationship could be headed for trouble. We may need to take a break and then focus on the things we like, love, and respect about our partner.

Don’t ever tell our spouse they are overreacting. When we do, we are telling them their feelings aren’t important to us. We need to try and understand where they are coming from, they have those feelings for a reason and we need to find out what the reason is.

When we find our self becoming contemptuous we need to recognize it and stop it. We can take a deep breath. We can make it our goal to be aware of what contempt is, find out specifically what it looks like when we do it, and quit doing it. We can find another way to make our point. Contempt is a bad habit, a bad habit we need to break. If we are aware of it when we see it and when we are doing it, we can change it.

Can we sow the seeds we want to grow, and pull out the weeds we don’t want to spread?

Marriage is a mosaic you build with your spouse. Millions of tiny moments that create your love story. Jennifer Smith

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, happiness, and love.

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