The Right, The Wrong, and The Middle Path!

Life is all about decisions. Every moment we are making one decision or another. Some of these decisions are big, life changing ones, while others are small, less significant decisions. For example, right now, you have the option of continuing to read this post, or click on the little cross button on the top right hand side of the web page. This small decision will affect, in the least, the next five minutes of your life.

Before you make a decision, you invariably weigh your options – either you choose the better of two goods, or as is more probable, the lesser of two evils.

But how do you define what is good, and what is bad.

However much we may like to claim that we are the masters of our own thought, the fact remains that our thoughts are a result of years of indoctrination of what the society believes to be right, or wrong. What is even more surprising is that most people who tell you the difference between right and wrong – and expect you to do right – themselves choose what might not be right, but, of course, they have a very good reason for it.

The most common being - Life is not black and white, but grey!

I am sure all of us have used that statement to get out of a tough spot, or justify a decision that we knew was not one of the best that we could have made.

So, what are we supposed to do?

Before I try to answer that, I will assume that most of us are aware of what is right and what is wrong. It is simply the enormity of the consequences of doing the right thing that makes us stray from that path. For example a kid may lie to his parents about his marks to avoid the scolding he might receive if he speaks the truth. It is just a small, but relevant example nonetheless.

Just like that kid, we are constantly deviating from the right track, to avoid unpleasant consequences. Then we find an excuse to justify our deviation. Sometimes the excuse is so good that we are convinced that what we did was the best possible course of action.

But these deviations, over the long run, lead to confusions. Since we have always justified our behaviour in the past, we are convinced that what we have done was right. We ask ourselves then, “What did I do to deserve this? Haven’t I always done the right thing?”

Maybe we haven’t. Maybe in our search for a middle path, we have taken the wrong path. It is not that there is not a middle path, but taking the middle path is actually harder than taking the right path, because the middle path is not defined, and each one of us must define that for ourselves. Before we can do that, we have to ensure that we have the capability to do so. We must not fool ourselves to believe that we have that capability, we must be sure that we have.

Till the time we have the capability, I say, it is best to choose the white, over the black and grey. What say you?