Right, Righteous Rightness.

I like being right. Who doesn’t? It’s our nature. It’s the way we protect the ego. And it feels so good. So of course I want to be right. I just don’t want to be known as The Person Who is Always Right. (A.k.a. “That Asshole.”)

I have to be careful. My temperament, my astrological sign and my life experience all make me tend to feel that if everyone would just please do what I think best, the whole world would operate so much more smoothly. It would be easy for me to lose the balance between “right” and “always right.”

In an attempt to steady that balance, I’ve been looking for another way to think about and articulate the right kind of “right.” I tried thinking in terms of being “righteous.” It has a nice 60s-hip, Rastafarian kind of vibe; but it feels too close to self-righteous. So lately, I have taken to using the word “rightness.” Being in rightness. Acting from a place of rightness.

What it means for me is that, whatever happens, I’m striving to respond in the best way. And not by the text-book rules. Not the way that could be upheld in a court of law. Not the way that’s technically right, defensively right, justifiably right. But the way that I know, in my heart of hearts, is right.

When I look at it in that way, I can’t help but think of a spiritual leader who famously and consistently defied religious “rules” in favor of doing what was right: Jesus. From my Sunday school days, I remember the story—and the image it created in my mind--of Jesus and the disciples, hungry wanderers, walking through the cornfields on a Sabbath. “They plucked the ears of corn and did eat, rubbing them in their hands,” says chapter 6 of the book of St. Luke.

Picking corn on a Sunday? The Pharisees were not having it. Technically Christ and his crew were harvesting and it was so totally against the rules to harvest on the Sabbath. It was against the law to heal a sick person on Sabbath, too. But He did it anyway. And did it right in the synagogue. Clearly, He wasn’t about the rules. He was all about the rightness.

The rightness is doing the best thing you can do under the circumstances. It is weighing the thing you might not really want to do, that it would be easier not to do—that no one would even blame you if you didn’t do—and doing it anyway because it’s for the highest good.

I've been struggling through a book on spiritual relationship called Why Talking is Not Enough: 8 Loving Actions That Will Transform Your Marriage. (More on that later. Or check it out for yourself at susanpage.com.) I say struggling not because the book is too dense or academic or complicated. It’s simple. It encourages you to treat your partner with rightness. To treat him with good will. To think of giving more than you focus on getting. To overlook the thing(s) about your partner that makes you angry, hurt or willing to pull each strand of hair out of your scalp piece by piece. Practice acceptance. Have some compassion.

How hard is that? Very. The easy thing is to do what seems to be in your own ego’s best interest: to get yours, to blame him, to forget that you make him want to pluck himself bald sometimes, too. It is easier to be see yourself as right than it is to set aside your resentment, anger, hurt or fear long enough to see that the other person could possibly be right, too.

But in any love relationship (and I mean any kind of love) the best thing is the thing you know, in your heart of hearts, is right. And that means being in rightness with and for everyone involved.

So when it you both know it’s his turn to wash the dishes—and he always seems to have an excuse not to do it, and then when he does he makes a mess of the job anyway, and will invariably break something or put dishes away wrong, and you have no idea what his Mama was doing when she was supposed to be teaching him how to do this one simple task—but you also know he’s stressed about his project at work and could afford to spend some time on that, rightness means you’ll bust those suds yourself. Just this once. And maybe the next time.