Polluted Relationships

Life’s too short to spend breathing in bad relational air. There are people and organizations that have pollutants in their atmosphere.

There are relationships in life that cause a slow leak in your spirit, leaving you flat over time. It’s often goes undetected and it’s not until you’re well into your ride that the problem becomes evident. There can be something in the relational atmosphere that is unhealthy. Here are some particulates of a polluted relational atmosphere:

Lack of Grace: You are given one strike and your out. It is usually an unwritten rule that you find out about the hard way. You can consistently do a bang up job, but one poor performance and you’re taken off stage. You are relegated to a bit player and now perform under the scrutinizing gaze of judgement.

Pragmatism: This “ism”, at its basic premise, is using and working with only what works. We like the models, the formulas, the ingenious ways we have developed in our lives and the workplace for things to work, and work well. We’re enamored with them. The same, sometimes sadly, applies to our personal relationships. Once they don’t work, or work well, and no longer provide the needed benefits, we abandon them, leaving the other person relationally “useless.”

Impatience: We live in an always on culture. We live like a stone skipping on the surface of a lake. There is no chance for depth or time for contemplation. If something does not come about on our time frame, we move on, and quickly. As a result of that frenetic pace, there is a resultant lack of patience for something that takes a long time. Same with relationships. If they don’t become deep and meaningful quickly we become frustrated. Yet, something as complex as a human relationship takes a great amount of time to go deep, even longer to become profound.

Here, now, is a purification tip to help clean up a polluted relational atmosphere: Gratitude. Gratitude is more than just being thankful for all you have and leaving it at that. It is choosing gratitude as an actual way of life. Not just having, as the cliche states, the attitude of gratitude, but a behavioral shift to treat everything and everyone in a tangible way that proves you truly care. That’ll help clean the dirty air up.