Well, actually…

Sr. Catherine Grace's New Year's Eve blog was the inspiration for two of us to make party hats. We also played charades last night. I don't especially like charades. I'm not good at games.

Yet at my advanced age I've lost all sense of pride, so… when it was my turn to act out my phrase I launched into the effort with abandon. Sounds like… hair! The group went through the entire alphabet but never came up with "They're". Okay, second word: Sounds like… bust! And yes, I was pointing to my chest and other words surfaced before they got it. But nobody could come up with "just". Third word: second syllable… lines! First syllable… sounds like… hide. Nobody could think of "guide." Frustrated and laughing so hard I was about to wet my pants, I turned my party hat around so it drooped down over my eye and grabbed Simon's bone and did my best imitation of a swashbuckling pirate. Suddenly the group came alive. Pirates! Johnny Depp! "They're just guidelines!"

"Well actually, they're just guidelines" was one of the phrases from the first Pirates of the Caribbean that was a standard response from my Novice Guardian my first year in community. We were experimenting with the whole formation process and I was one of the guinea pigs. Every time something would contradict something else we'd been taught, out would come the stock phrase. It was as frustrating then to hear it as it was to act out last night.

But that first year I learned flexibility in a way I'd never experienced before. As irritable as I would get over what I perceived as glaring inconsistencies in what was expected of me, I softened and mellowed and surrendered to the inevitable response. "Well, actually, they're just guidelines." How fitting I would draw that one from the hat.