Unwritten Rules

"I try very hard to live my life by rules."

Of all the things President Del R. Jones of the Arizona Tempe Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has ever said to me, that may be the one I remember the best, and the one I strive the hardest to emulate.

He went on to explain that the rules he lived by were not made with exceptions. "Exceptions are few and obvious," he said. When we define an exception as part of a rule, the exception eventually becomes the rule. In other words, we spend more time trying to make exceptions than we do trying to live by the rules we ourselves have chosen.

I heard on the radio the other day an ad that said something like, "Some people take time off from skiing to have babies, work, or whatever." That's not an exact quote, but I always thought that people took time off from work and ordinary family concerns to go skiing. To me this personifies letting the exception become the rule.

Most of the rules I live by are unwritten - at least by me. They are guiding principles that apply to and influence my every day actions. At times in my life when I've tried to sit down and make a list of the rules I live by, I've usually come away frustrated because what I end up with is either so broad that it's essentially meaningless, or so specific that it's more like a technical manual than a personal code of conduct. I think to myself, "I can see it so clearly in my mind, why can't I translate it into language?"

That's not to say that I can't give absolute definitions to any parts of my code. For example, I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs. Period. No questions, no exceptions. That's black and white. I always go to church on Sunday. That one has had a few exceptions over the years (for sickness and other such circumstances), but the rule is unchanging, and the exceptions are not pre-defined.

The tricky part is the situational dilemmas of daily life. How do I approach a person about a given topic? How do I respond to certain types of behavior? What do I do with my free time? These are only a few of the questions we all deal with.

Though it may defeat the purpose, I will attempt periodically over the course of this blog to document some of my less tangible rules in a way that preserves their spirit - which is what they are all about. I'll try to give concrete definitions to the principles I live by, and that should help create a feel for the nature of the unwritten rules.