Choosing failure

As a language learner, I actually have a sick love of learning grammar and vocabulary. The first language I studied from scratch was Latin which was partly awesome because I didn't have to speak it...until I did. You see I went to a Latin summer camp, and we had a class in spoken Latin. Oh my. Here I was, a super Latin dork, and I couldn't string sentences together for the life of me. I learned a few stock phrases and stuck with them. No matter, it's not like I was ever going to run into a native Latin speaker.

But then I studied Russian. Same thing--learned boat loads of grammar--but this time I went to Russia and worked at a children's hospital where everyone was a Russian speaking monolingual. My speaking abilities were dreadful. Pretty much the only people I could chat up were the kids who all had psychiatric or developmental problems. For all the grammar and linguistics I knew, I could not hold a coherent conversation with adults. Agh.

To get over my grammar hangup, I developed this strategy: each day I would pick one grammatical feature and try to use that correctly. For example, everything else could fall by the wayside, but I would form the past tense correctly. I'm pretty sure that the first weeks of this I was still pretty unintelligible to the other hospital workers, but as time passed I increased my vocabulary and I got more and more comfortable with different grammatical features. 18 months later when I moved to Kazakhstan, I was pretty comfortable working in Russian and even studied Kazakh with a tutor that only spoke Russian and Kazakh. (Learning to recite math equations in Kazakh through Russian explanations was exhausting.)

I don't know if it's a Western thing or a life thing, but I find myself often inundated with "how things should be done"; 10 steps to a being a better Christian, 7 highly effective habits of a healthy marriage, how to write a dissertation in 15 minutes a day. And the thing is I actually think a lot of the advice given has merit, but there is no way for me to implement all of it now. So I choose failure in almost everything so that I can practice one thing. My "one things"right now are:

1) Pray scripture. I haven't done this in a while and I'm finding it refreshing.
2) Tell N when he pisses me off instead of stuffing it inside.
3) Touch the dissertation everyday Monday through Saturday.

So forgive me if my life looks a little herky-jerky from your end, but I just don't have it together and I can only focus on so much at any one point in time.

If you're looking for a "one thing" for yourself, I offer you this verse from my childhood:

Psalm 100

1Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.

2Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

3Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

4Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

5For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.