What would happen if...

...when someone asked you to do something and you weren't really, totally, quite exactly sure whether you wanted to do it or not, instead of saying, "Okay, yes," you said, "Um, no."

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.

The Fiction of Potential

We weeded and turned over the earth, mixing in manure and compost until the garden spot was black, rich and fecund. Then Little Bitty and I carefully sowed string bean seeds. Within days, they sprouted, strong and green. The tomato vines surged up and spread before I had a chance to stake them. The squash leaves were as big as my hand, their blossoms bright with potential.

Since then, one of the squash plants yielded a single yellow crookneck—then the leaves turned moldy and the vine split and rotted at the root. From three long rows of string beans I pulled one handful of beans—not enough for a meal. I got three plum tomatoes off the overgrown vine; the other plant dried up from the ground up. A few stunted green tomatoes are clinging futilely to the brittle, brown vine, but they have no way to pull nourishment from the soil.

It is sad to see. But sadder, still, is the nagging thought that my fruitless garden is a metaphor for my life. I am a woman of ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. Good ideas—for myself, for my career, for my partner and my child and my friends. “We could do this!” “You could do that!” “Isn’t this brilliant?” “Let’s try….” “Let’s start….” “Let’s do….”

The attic is full of boxes with concepts for novels, lyrics to songs, article ideas, beginnings of business plans. A publishable thesis manuscript, unpublished. Three issues of a lovely newsletter, now defunct. Just over my head—nestled into fluffy, itchy, pink insulation—live boxes and boxes of potential. My potential. Defunct. Fruitless.

Carolyn Hax, in her take-no-prisoners syndicated advice column, recently wrote: "Potential is fiction."

Fiction? Potential is something we hold up like a candle to light our way. We hire it. We vote for it. We marry it. We give birth to it—and nurture it with our whole hearts. Because we have been taught to believe in possibility. We have learned to believe that “may” or “might” or “could” or “should” is enough to stand on.

But in the movie Amistad, there is a scene in which Djimon Hounsou’s character— the enslaved Mende, Sengbe Pieh—is told by his American lawyer that something that “should” have secured their legal victory and freed Sengbe to return home to Africa, didn’t. Sengbe shouts in frustration, “What is this word ‘should’?” There was no translation for it in his language, he said. Either something happened or it didn’t.

And that is not fiction. We do or we don't do. We bear fruit or we don't. It doesn't matter how green the string bean plants are if there is nothing on them we can eat.

Potential is the story we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night. Frankly, I’d rather stay awake if it means that I am doing something instead of making dreams that will disappear in the light of morning. I want to do more than just send up green leaves. I want to flower! What would it take for me to finally, decidedly bear fruit?

I have to admit that I am only a potential gardener. Once my vegetable plants were sturdily in the ground, I left them to their own devices. Though it has been scorchingly hot, I wouldn’t break the rules and cheat the water restrictions in our drought-stricken city. My approach to organic gardening is to leave it to The Gardener. I could have done more to nourish the plants and protect them from parasites and blight. I could do more for myself.

My first step is to step away from the notion that potential is something I can stand on. I have to remember what Iyanla Vanzant wrote: “There is nothing between doing and not doing that can be trusted.” Between doing and not doing lies the quicksand of potential. And that's no place from which anything can grow.

Know. Do.

She started quietly, lifting one picture off its nail in the wall and placing it in the hallway. Then she carefully took down another. By the time she started moving the furniture, she didn't bother to tiptoe. The bedside table slid along the floor. The nails she was wrenching out of the walls came free with a squeak and tinked to the floor. When her husband finally roused from sleep, the only thing left in the room was the bed he was sleeping in. "What are you doing?" he asked, trying to make sense of what he'd awakened to.

"I am MOVING!" she said, leaning in, looking him square in the eye. "You can stay. You can go. But I am moving."

That's my girl Rox. She'd started quietly, she says, months earlier, talking about how quickly they were outgrowing their apartment. It was time to move themselves and their two young children out of the two bedrooms they rented, she'd said. Over the weeks, she kept bringing it up. And he kept saying, "We're gonna..." But nothing ever actually happened.

That morning, she'd had it. Totally. After she emptied the bedroom, she started on the kids' room, and she kept going until finally everything but the bare necessities was stacked in the living room or packed in boxes.

All this talk about Plan B? She didn't have one. Hadn't looked for a new place. Had no idea where they would find one. She just knew it was time to go and that she was going. She was not asking. She was not suggesting. She wasn't waiting. She was moving.

What she had was more powerful than a B-plan: She had clarity--a crystaline certainty about what was needed. And she trusted herself and her God enough to know she could make it happen--whether her husband came along for the ride or spent the rest of his days lying in the middle of their empty room.

Her story made me realize something: a plan B is just courage in a bottle. It's something we stir up, distill, and label Our Saving Grace. But what really saves us is our own willingness (willingness) to leap right past fear, self-doubt, second-guessing or whatever else has been holding us back, and put our feet down on what we really want, need, deserve and demand.

The best plan is simple, really: Know. Do.

As for Rox, it was barely two weeks after she emptied the bedroom around her sleeping husband that she was moving into a quaint house on a hill in a lovely old neighborhood. Husband and children in tow.