It's easy in life to think that things are black-and-white, that there is a duality to everything, and that one must choose between two extremes, two choices, two diametrically opposed things. We don't just do this with our choices, Republican or Democrat, pro-or-con for critical issues, but also our values. We either carry a value or we don't, we are either right or wrong, we are either mature or immature, we either are honest or dishonest.
It's dangerous to think about life in terms of dualities alone. It's better to think about values and expressions of self in terms of their being on a spectrum. We are neither mature nor immature, but rather more mature in certain values and less mature in others, with a need to practice maturity in the areas in which we lack it. We are not honest or dishonest but need to practice honesty to become better at it, in order to move along the spectrum towards more honesty. But even the spectrum of these values can be unclear sometimes; do all of us see maturity in the same way and is all maturity beneficial? Is 100 percent transparency warranted?
What seems the best policy to adopt is to practice getting better at the values which connect us more to the universal, to promoting love. We should keep striving to move ourselves just a little further along the spectrum, aiming for the highest ideals but knowing we may never quite reach them perfectly. And this is okay because there is beauty in our humanity, beauty in our striving. We need to get away from punishing ourselves with expectations based on dualities which don't exist. No one is perfectly mature, no one is perfectly honest. All of us, children and adults, need instead
to know to practice healthy values to get better at them in order to ultimately bring goodness back to the world.
