Insanity

I've recently been back to reading Mark Twain again - the book I picked up I haven't quite figured out yet, but it is something either critiquing or endorsing Chrisitan Science. This is the religon founded by Mary Baker Eddy - it also includes the prestiguous newspaper or what ever it is now - the Christian Science Monitor. Twain describes an encounter with a healer and his initial learning of the church and goes into a discussion of insanity. How everyone in the world is insane to one degree or other. The definition he uses is when another person differs in opionion with another. He goes quite in depth and I would ruin his linguistic talent to try to paraphrase it, but he goes on to say that this is the basis for disagrement among political parties, governments, neighbors, other religions, etc. The fact that I or we as it were don't agree is because we think they are insane to some degree. I've been thinking about this all day and it's really quite facinating when you start to break down everything.

There is no right or wrong - only differences of opinion a good friend of mine wrote something similar about a concept live and let live and it fits in here as well. If you disagree with someone why is it such a big deal. Who are you to know better and what does it really matter in the end if you are right or wrong? It makes thing in this world all that much easier to laugh at because most of the time disagreements are laughable in the grand scheme of things. We argue about trivial matters in this country - there are people who starve to death - they have NOTHING to eat and our congress fought about people who couldn't afford converter boxes for their televisions. Now don't get me wrong I'm not saying that just because our country is prosperous we should have to give up that to make all the worlds problems go away. It's more about having an open mind.

Insanity by others is defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. I present to you our current economic situation. There is only one explaination for it - people who think they can continue doing the same things to save failing companies - prevent pain by letting them fail. The only way true growth can occur is to have pain - pain bad enough to want a difference. Sometimes it's better to touch the red hot stove to learn that it's really hot.

This brings me back to the Twain book - put both of these concepts together and things start to flesh out. If insanity is a difference of opinion and a part of it is repeating this over and over, each time expecting that people will change or conform just because we want them to - we begin to see why the world is the way it is. Things tend to go to extremese before there is a correction. My personal life proves it (at least to me it does). I've never been able to do things just a little, or medium, mediocore, whatever word you want to describe the middle. I am all or none - no half-ass for me. I truly thing most everyone else in the world is just like me in this respect.

Moderation is the key for me - in terms of my sanity it is critical. Carrying things to the extreme and expecting that the world will be handed to you on a silver platter is one side of my problems. The other is that I expect that nothing will happen - that my life is stuck on the same railroad to nowhere. Reality lies somewhere in the middle and is generally much better than either extreme. How I get to that point is something I'm trying to figure out, but what I'm learning is that I have a lot to learn, that putting one foot in front of the other is all I can do somedays.

Progress not perfection.