Drawing strength from our differences

Dec 29, 2011

There are things we never imagine are possible until we board a kayak on Lake Nyamusingire and look back at the banks covered by Maramagambo forest. Growing within the natural forest trees are apartments making up Jacana Safari Lodge.

By Hillary Bainemigisha

There are things we never imagine are possible until we board a kayak on Lake Nyamusingire and look back at the banks covered by Maramagambo forest. Growing within the natural forest trees are apartments making up Jacana Safari Lodge.

They blend in a way that makes you wonder why you never thought of this before. The scene unites trees and shrubs with apartments and human settlements the way patriots, saboteurs, hard workers, thieves, their accomplices and whistle-blowers gather in a Movement college.

My wife and I took time off to appreciate the lodge’s brilliant relevance to the ecology. We ended up discussing the differences between us, which always crop up in marital arguments and wondering how someone can blend a great safari lodge within a natural setting of a forest and lakes and it works, yet couples prefer to instead concentrate their squabbles on small differences they have.

Up to that time, I had made a mental note to baptise my wife Miss ninth Parliament because her approach to her husband’s public life is basically similar.

But after this experience, I apologised and she did not ask me to step aside, a sign that the environment was also working on her.

The funny bit is that this kind of blending of opposite natural elements is a scientific law of attraction of unlike poles. In my counselling life, I have seen couples with incongruent characteristics blend perfectly. In politics, I have seen the Movement.

In life, I know it works. But what happens when couples start thinking their love cannot work because they are different?

It is usually a perception issue. And more often than not, it marks the beginning of making a small crack a big divide. We are all different in character, ambition, expectation and belief.

Fortunately, when we marry, there is a motivation to make it work in form of love. Love enables us to withstand all inconveniences and what we call differences to form a blending union. The differences start complementing and the two married people become one. And when you think of it, what would an individual be looking for in another of a similar nature.

We all yearn for value addition and we get it from another who has what we do not have. Counsellors call it fulfillment.

And speaking of blending, people in love eventually tend to think that it happens as a matter of course. Unfortunately, it does not. We have to keep working on it as an everlasting love mission. And through that mission, we need to avoid looking out for things that separate us unless we want to invest in exploiting them to our advantage.

Tomorrow, we start a new year. To many of us, it is for fun, fireworks, dancing, food and name it. Some make resolutions and proceed to forget them in a hurry. But if you have read this far, I have an assignment for you. Use the New Year to re-launch your love life. We often go offline and need to return to base.

If it is your habit to make resolutions, now do it with your partner and draft love specific resolutions, which you will use at this time next year to appraise yourselves.

But if resolutions are not your type of menu, sit down as a couple and appraise how 2011 has been. Draw lessons from it and draft action points on what you need to do in the following year.

Among them, make specific resolutions to use your differences to harmonise your relationship. And if you do not think it can work, save some money, go out and you will appreciate the importance of how differences make up a harmonious blend.
Happy New Year.

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