How to compromise without diminishing yourself?
I don’t know exactly, but think about it …
Mediocrity comes from middle and height. A human reaching on mediocrity is shortening its stature. Not height, that’d be a horror movie. Stature. We bow to become more average.
That is the great work of relationships. How to function independently, how to preserve individuality, all without the slightest intrusion in another’s path, way or space? It’s hard, because the moment you share your world a compromise is born.
Compromise is not bad. It is actually a great skill of rational beings, as compromise is based on foreseen outstanding consequences of adopting present mediocrity.
But I wonder, can we have a new way, one where each individual is preserving itself in its strongest acts, beliefs and personality and we all still stay in a shared reality world, building a cohesive society?
My first bet would be that instead of the art of the compromise, we’d require a better skill of staying out of the way. Which is already progress since a skill is far easier to grasp than an art. Ha, I dream of a world made of social “Fred Astaire”s dancing their way to self esteem.
Then, maybe, we’ll ditch tolerance. What a mediocre description of acceptance. Tolerance is poison. While you tolerate anything, that tolerance eats at you from the inside out. Acceptance is what we meant, but we couldn’t swallow it, so we halved it in tolerance bits.
Oh and elegance in place of force. Wouldn’t that be right? Force is the mediocre description of aptitude, isn’t it? The apt though couldn’t elegantly carry their own principles’ weight so they bowed and picked up force.
The great work of relationships, all kinds of relationships, romantic, political, business relationships, is to keep compromise at bay. The moment a compromise is made a relationship becomes formal, tamed, dated and breakable.
When Sun and Rain compromise, the result is a rainbow, because neither the Sun nor the Rain will have a single bit of their nature given up in their heavenly relationship, neither do they care too much about the fleeting moment it lasts, while it lasts entire civilisations below stay agape and witness a glimpse of the all encompassing Spectrum above.