Balance in life

Things didn’t sort themselves out last night.  It’s not that today was bad, but the revelation of what’s next and what is going to come didn’t happen like I was hoping.  I suppose the time of the year for bursting forth and flowering has past and now it’s time to hunker down and get ready for winter again.

Still not quite ready to publicly or at least admit to this blog in an anonymously public fashion what happened to me and why my life has been so difficult. I do somehow think that it might be helpful for  me - maybe.

For now I want to write out something that has been kicking around in my head for some time,  the idea of balance in life.  Life is a delicate balance.  Look at the name of my blog, toxicity is really a balance.  Too much of any substance can kill.  Anyone who has stayed successfully married knows that the balance between husband and wife is the difference between wedded bliss and divorce.  Sometimes there is a wide balancing point and sometimes it’s razor thin.

Balance of character defects and virtuous attributes is also interesting and it’s what I’ve spent a lot of time chewing on.  For example, procrastination is something every person has dealt with and struggled through at times in life.  Anyone who denies this is just procrastinating telling you the truth!  Some people seem to do better with it than others and use the artificially created pressure to get things done.

Now take patience, no question all of us wish we could be more patient.  In fact there is a saying - patience is a virtue.  The fascinating thought I have carried for a long time is that the differences between these to attributes is razor thin and it depends entirely upon one’s perspective.  Both involve being waiting, both involve putting off of something.  In some ways both involve conscious effort NOT to take action.  The balance point where is where being patient transforms into procrastination.

Often this is something that can only be seen in hindsight, if you are patiently waiting to work on a project for some good reason, that’s fine.  It can quickly change to procrastination thought when the reason you were waiting has happened and now the project can move forward.  If you were patiently  waiting to talk to your child about their behavior (like not eating vegetables) and you make them noodles once again because you say to yourself “now is not the time”, your behavior has quickly changed into procrastination.

It’s such a fine line to cross from virtue to defect that it’s missed and only after the line is crossed do you notice and feel bad about it.

The questions I want to answer about this are numerous.  I see this line with a number of virtue and defect combinations and they are line’s that everyone crosses multiple times in their lives.  The problem I see is that we forget that up until the line is crossed we were displaying good behavior and after we cross it, at some point we forget that we were good and now we only see the bad.  It’s also quite easy for others to see and point out (and less obvious for the person displaying the behavior).

How exactly this knowledge might help someone is also something I haven’t quite ascertained yet.  I sense that this could be helpful in the right setting and may help people who suffer from crushing guilt.  It hopefully would help them see that they are really good people who have just made some error in judgement.  It might help them see that the person who points out their error is probably making that same error ten times more often.

It might also help them to see that while the behavior balance has tipped back towards defect for the time, it’s really not that hard to tip back to virtue, because the underlying virtue is still there.