“QTMs” is shorthand for Quiet Time Musings. I spent several years publishing them each Monday morning, then stopped before they became boring. I’ll offer QTMs on Saturday mornings, where once I published a variety of stories, often featuring Granger and friends.
You’ll just have to drop in for some java on a regular basis to keep up with Granger’s adventures, because you’ll never know when or where they’ll appear.
“Think in harmony. Be agreeable.” (2 Corinthians 13:11)
Harmony. Does anyone even know what that means?
If you’re a musician, you understand the term. But thinking and speaking in harmony? It only takes a few minutes of scanning and listening to social media to realize that’s so not happening.
Sit and listen to conversations around you. I don’t encourage eavesdropping. It’s hardly difficult, though, with so many ambling along store aisles, in parking lots, even in restaurants, phones held casually in air, audibly blabbing with whomever. Listen to the level of conversation; the coarse, sloppy speech, the familiarity of profane namecalling.
And those are their friends. I need not belabor the point; you’re ahead of me.
If you and I are discussing a particular matter, we normally offer differing, even opposing points of view. Opinions vary. Depending on the issues, we each may feel deeply about our positions.
Okay. So how do we think and discuss our differences in harmony? We do it as friends who love and respect each other. We do the same thing verbally as musicians do instrumentally or vocally. We each ‘play’ our own part, revealing how well we’ve prepared – practiced, if you will.
We agree that if we need to disagree, we commit ourselves to doing so while remaining agreeable. There’s a reason why choirs and orchestras are tuned prior to performing, right? They don’t just dash in, skid to a halt, plop down in their chairs, and sing or play.
Just calling it ‘harmonizing our thoughts’ won’t make them so unless we’re willing to listen enough to the other’s point of view until we are able to correctly articulate one another’s position, agree or not.
To harmonize, you must sing different parts. No lock step. No rigid adherence to the same melody or part. “Harmony” implies at least two distinctly separate notes retaining their difference while recognizing the individual, distinct parts of each one in a way that compliments both.
In a sense, then, thinking in harmony requires us to voice our differences while doing the same thing. It seems obvious that the results are both of us having not only a better understanding of each other’s position, but a wiser, wider grasp of our own.
© D. Dean Boone, January 2022