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You’re Not So Bad….
“I’m a bad person.”
Have you heard someone say that? Was it you?
With one little mistake, we make a judgment that condemns us for eternity. The tally is final. There is no redemption.
Thanks to my friend Donny Riley for reminding me of the duality that we live in, within our own minds. The duality of good and bad, kind and mean, smart and dumb. That last one is a great illustration of the arbitrary nature of duality.
There are standards and tests for evaluating intelligence. We understand that there is a definite “line” where the title MENSA kicks in. What about someone who is only one point lower in IQ? Or at the other end, at what point is someone declared stupid?
And what about all those people in between? Are they never smart? Are they never stupid? Speaking for myself, my answer is no and no.
At the danger of sounding aloof, I know that there are times that I have felt like a genius! And there times that I have felt mentally inept. D’oh! Downright brain-dead.The IQ is a spectrum in and of itself that cannot define us in all of our complexity, gifts, and self-made obstacles. Each of us has a spectrum of all possibilities. The idiot-savant can do things that the rest of us can only dream of, yet score very low on the spectrum.
As we go through life, we do some good things and some bad things, and neither one of them defines us. On the spectrum of our internal standards, we can land on any point of the spectrum, though it does not negate the times we land near the top.
Do you see that the human condition sometimes kicks us down that spectrum to a lower “score” that might not have happened at a moment of clarity?
It’s a time to forgive ourselves. If we don’t forgive ourselves, we will find it hard to forgive others when they land on the low end of the spectrum. It’s a result of the human condition, that’s all. (Thank you, Martha Creek!)
We cannot expect perfection. We can merely work at moving the average up the spectrum, create an aggregate through awareness and change that continually climbs up the spectrum.
We are “Both – And.”Always. Neither one defines us. Neither one negates us. Good-evil. Right-wrong. Kind-mean.
In the world of ink on paper, a photograph is made up of ink dots of black against a white paper background. There is no gray but for the contrast of black and white, no highlights or shadows without a gradation of large and small points of ink and paper. If we take away the black, I disappear.
Breathe. Acknowledge the truth and step up. Let go of the guilt blame shame. Our perfection is in our imperfection.
Duality is not either-or. It’s both-and. Each duality becomes a spectrum of polarities. And it’s all good.
