Strange new world

Our family is planning a vacation. For some reason, planning for this particular vacation seems to involve a lot more detail than previous vacations have. This in turn has provided the occasion for extended discussions between my husband and myself. I admit to being a strong-willed person. My husband is, too. It may be superfluous to add that we're both stubborn. Furthermore, just to make things fun, our sets of likes and dislikes seem to be almost completely contradictory. And if all that isn't bad enough, my husband's idea of expressing disagreement usually involves sarcasm and mockery. You can imagine that there have been some tense moments in our house lately. The epic battle over Disney/no Disney raged over the course of some three days. It still hasn't been fully resolved.

So imagine my surprise today when I realized that all our hours of discussion, veering as they have between heated debate and protracted disagreement, have resulted in the beginnings of an itinerary that is better than what either of us would have come up with on our own. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, or something to that effect. We're even communicating better as far as being able to express our different viewpoints and priorities in ways that the other person can reasonably absorb. Teamwork. Wow. What a concept.

The thing that strikes me as almost unbearably funny about this is that both of us are so old to be entering into a new phase of cooperation and working together. I thought you couldn't teach an old dog new tricks.