Accepting the good with the bad in life

It is never healthy to see only one side of an issue. No matter what a person can spend time thinking about, discussing or learning, there is always at least one other point of view that provides a different way of looking at it. Even truth has error that it can be compared to in order to be accepted or denied.

Now, I understand that for the young, or inexperienced it is necessary to teach them only one way of explaining a theory or performing a task. But realise that when a child asks “why”, he is not so much challenging his lessons or his instructors, as he is asking to see the other side of the coin. Without the other side of the coin, a person cannot make a comparison for himself, and is left to letting others think for him.

We are people given to comparisons, where our acceptance of the state of one thing is determined by our understanding of the state of another. We accept the fact that one task is harder to do than another, because one may demand more energy or cause more stress to the body than another. But if all tasks required an equal amount of energy, we would probably never complain about how difficult our work is, because we’d have no easier task to compare it to.

It stands to reason then, that if we constantly focus on either all the joys or all the pains of life, we will compare joy to joy, sorrow to sorrow and end up being either irritatingly miserable or nauseatingly euphoric (in either case, lacking a healthy, functional grasp on reality).

Wouldn’t it be better then, to realise both sides of the coin, see the good and the bad side of things and appreciate them both for exactly what they are: compliments of each other?

Just a thought…


copyright (c) JMStevens, 2001