Image © Jose & MidJourney
An acquaintance asked folks, clickbait style because social networks seem to normalize this, if we thought our job was to know the answers or ask the questions. This complete with a line with arrows in two opposite directions and a middle point.
I pondered. Not about the question itself but about the way to ask this and many other questions, this sort of “for or against”, or “black or white”. I find that I am for and against a lot of things, but less and less at the extremes of this line with arrows. And for many of the things I am for and against, if you stacked them, I am not sure you’d make sense of it, or perhaps I am fooling myself and one of these new smart tools would immediately catalog me. As for “black or white”, I wish I could say I am color blind, but I am not. I am also not at the end of the line where the arrows reside somewhere in the infinite road where extremism lives, but I come from a generation that avoided gray, and this is before the film. I was raised and pushed to have a side, to choose something to defend, even if to exercise argumentation for and against. I also take a deep breath when someone says “it depends”, knowing we have probably said this ourselves, it’s a great way to go from general to the specific, but also a way to avoid generalizing things that ought to be general, we should have a large enough number of things we are simply for and against, period. But “it depends” allows you to dance, to play a game where, depending, you are for something and the next minute for the opposite.
I have discussed the journey of some into the extreme of that line naturally forces others to travel the line to the other extreme, it’s either a natural way to deal with stance and individualism, or simply the effects of balance, the physics of the pendulum. I think this about many things, from trends to positions about anything. But if for some “virtue is in the middle”, virtue in life should not always be in the middle. But if not at the extremes, what is the area we should occupy, that area where we are something, we mean something, we stand for something, but we don’t do that at the expense of losing sight of and respect what others believe, stand for.
And then we have “what we are, what we wish we would be, what others think we are”, but that is a whole new rabbit hole. For this poke my friend sent my way, I’d say I am more in the camp of asking the questions. As I age and supposedly know more, I find myself questioning what I know, the answers I have. I still talk too much, and may come across as someone that does have an answer for everything, but I aspire to be a question asking reflecting person.