Desperately Balanced

Rule #015: The measure of a man is the way he reconciles the difference between the way the world works, and the way he wishes the world worked.

For some reason, this one popped up in my head, and it seems pretty powerful to me. In life, very few things are the way we wish them to be. Life is the process of reconciling our wishes with reality, one way or another, and the choice of reconciliations one makes says a lot about a person.

The things to be reconciled might be small or large - my fingernails need to be trimmed, I'm unhappy in my marriage, a Tea Party candidate getting elected would likely ruin the country.

There are many ways to reconcile the differences - one might solve the problem. Easy in the case of fingernails, difficult in the face of national politics. One might choose not to care, to surrender, to stop aspiring for something different than what currently is. One might redirect their attentions and energies - becoming a good bowler rather than dealing with the problems in the marriage.

And presumably there's some way to measure a person by their choices. Someone who embraces religion as a way to strengthen their marriage is different from someone who has an affair as a way to escape their marriage. Someone who mows the lawn regularly is different from someone who lets it go to seed and become overgrown.

There's an echo here in something from Robin Hobb's work, where the Fool comments how so many people don't believe their lives can make a difference, when in fact everything that everyone does matters. If everything we do is seen as a choice, as a course of action between what is and what might be, then those choices determine everything about the person who chooses.

I'm sure a student of philosophy would scoff at this as a rehash of better thought out works. But it's working for me, for now, and that's good enough for me.