We watch a lot of Japanese Anime at our house. In fact, over the past five plus years, i'm fond of saying that we've probably consumed more animated entertainment from Japan than from anywhere else in the world, and could probably compete even with most Japanese people for our mastery of the relative plot-lines and universes associated with our favorite series titles. In Eastern Europe last November, i actually spent 90 minutes on a bus from Krakow to Auschwitz with a Japanese exchange student from Tokyo and, combined with my affection for martial arts and history, made him laugh at one point as he commented that i was "probably more Japanese than he was".
At any rate, if you watch much Anime, you can't go for long without engaging the series called Neon Genesis: Evangelion. It's your standard "mecha anime" and revolves around the notion that there are aliens (called "Angels") attacking Earth at regular intervals, and only a crack team of child-piloted giant robots (called Eva's - short for Evangelion) can save the earth from these extra-terrestrial monsters. The Eva's are gigantic, cybernetic creatures capable of their own thought and action (sort-of), and while the plot of the Anime isn't really that unique, it's still considered seminal to many that followed in the same vein.
The "point" of bringing this up is that in each episode, the human EVA pilot must stay "in sync" with the gigantic cyborg he/she controls. At the headquarters of NERV (the covert organization that maintains and deploys the EVA units) a huge board displays a set of nerve and psychographic data for the pilot, and a similar set of nerve and neuro-motor data for the EVA. In order for the EVA to function properly, the pilot and EVA have to be in "perfect sync". Some of the most tense moments in the series occur when a young pilot, distracted or rendered unconscious for some reason, "loses sync" with the nimble creature she is controlling, leaving the immense and heavily armored beast absolutely vulnerable to the inevitable attacks by the assaulting Angels sent to destroy the earth. So... "it all depends on the 'sync'!" No matter how capable your EVA, without "good sync", it's just a pile of cybernetic trash waiting to be hammered by frothing waves of alien firepower.
I feel like this on weekends a lot. My family, when all of us are together, are an "immensely powerful organism capable of repelling even the most aggressive alien attack"! I believe it! We are good together. But our biggest problem often seems to be "maintaining sync" with one another. We all come from such radically different worlds on the weekends. Elijah is in a whole world of activities, relationships and challenges at school. I run like a freak for hours on end here at GCC, and operate in worlds ranging from Indiana to India. Sami and Peri staple down the home with all of its myriad errands and to-do lists. When we all come together for 48 hours on the weekends, there's so much "turbulence" as we all try to figure out each other's relative frequencies that by the time we actually manage to achieve some level of "sync" again, the weekend is over and we all rev up for our separate individual combat environments. I'm sure some families are way better at it than we are, but we're trying to spend some significant time analyzing why for people who love each other as much as we do, what the contributing factors for why we struggle to relax together may be. If anyone has any recommendations, i'd love to hear them.
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I too have that problem. In part because "relaxing" looks different to all of us. My relax = read. My spouse = golf or fish. Paige = play. Breanna = who knows, she is a teenager. To quote some great people at GCC...change your expectations to desires. Don't expect that you WILL sync, but when you do...be delighted.
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