Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to personal development and character defects
I talk about the two sides of the coin often — primarily in reference to personal inventory and human nature.
Here’s what I mean.
Balance — all coins have two sides
Everything is a paradox and everything has its own opposite. Many things could not even exist without their opposite — darkness and light, good and bad, etc.
All principles, values and ideals have two sides, like a coin. That is why we hear so many self-development voices talking about boring-sounding balance.
Maybe I am alone here, but when I was younger and old people talked about balance as a solution to my problems, I remember only one thought.
‘BORING’
I wanted my boyfriend to give me my way — not balance.
I wanted to get the solo in show choir — not balance.
I wanted to fit in somewhere in the world with someone — not balance.
I wanted to get what I wanted — not balance.
I wanted acceptance, purpose, freedom and love. I wanted what I wanted and I couldn’t understand the gibberish they were speaking about balance. I had real life problems to deal with and here they were talking about balance.
The nerve. 🙄
Of course, I was unaware of the power that balance had over my life.
I wanted to sort everything out as either good or bad and throw away the bad. Understanding, now, that life doesn’t work that way, I can see how boring life would be if it did.
Looking back at the past manifestation of me, it is clear that my disregard of balance is what kept me in those endless loops of unhappiness and futility — the ones where you keep chasing or seeking but never catch or find.
When we seek a solution to anything in life, we often go to one extreme and then the other, only to find that the solution was somewhere in the middle all along.
When we find the solution, which is always somewhere in the middle, we no longer leave one side of the coin unattended while focusing on its opposite extreme.
Sometimes experiencing one extreme, or both, is necessary to find that place in the middle. The important thing is that we don’t stay on one extreme or the other, completely forgetting about the other side and its purpose.
We are full-spectrum human beings with many, many coins. Both sides of all those coins matters.
There is one thing above all else that has helped me conceptualize the value of some of the ugliest sides of our dearest human coins — that is conceding to my innermost self that two things can be completely contradictory in nature and both be true at the same time.
Two things can be completely juxtaposed and still both matter. Two things can appear to be arch enemies and still depend on each other for their own survival — even for their existence.
Most importantly, this is true in and of us.
It’s all good and it’s all bad, all at once — everything in us and everything about us.
The only problem is that too many of us have lost half of some of our coins because we are stuck in the extreme of the other side.
Cutting a quarter in half
Imagine if you had a 25 cent piece from the US, made of silver.
Somehow, you were able to cut it in half between heads and tales, right down the skinny middle.
First of all, that would be really hard. I mean, I have no idea how one would do that, maybe a special machine or something. It’s so thin it appears impossible.
If we tried to do it ourselves, we couldn’t. The head is so close to the tail and the silver is so strong. They are not made for us to separate them.
That is how our human coins are too — they are not made to be cut in half and the only easy way to do so is to cut it right down the middle of the circle, leaving neither side whole.
Now, even if we could easily take a quarter and slice it right down the skinny middle, why on earth would we do that?
It’s no longer worth anything — we can no longer spend it. Unlike a dollar bill, we probably couldn’t even tape it together and spend it at the corner store.
That is how our human coins are too. When we chop them up, we can’t spend them in life. We try to use the chopped up pieces of ourselves, but the world just spits them back at us — like the vending machine that won’t take that one quarter.
When you look at the full spectrum of any human characteristic, there is always the other side of the coin — they are all good and bad at the same time. The solution is found in balance, for all gifts can be liabilities and all liabilities can be gifts.
For example…
The ruinous coin of pride
Because of the ugly side of the pride coin, we lose sight of the other side. Where one side holds selfishness, false pride and ego, the other holds confidence, self-love and worthwhile pride.
We can be confident and proud of what we give to the world without being braggadocious and we can accept appreciation and compensation in exchange for the gifts we offer the world without being greedy or grandiose.
Through our collective efforts not to be grandiose, arrogant or greedy — the very principle of humility has been weaponized and turned against itself.
Embracing our gifts, sharing them with the world and accepting what the world has to offer in return is a very humble act — whether the world offers compliments, cash or capital.
The idea that we must deny compliments and avoid talking about our achievements, in order to be humble, has rendered the coin of pride and confidence worthless to many on many occasions.
Life is made up of a million coins
Life is a million coins.
There is the self coin — where we must not forget about the self-love side in our aversion to the overly self-absorbed side.
It is no secret that the coin holding both happiness and sadness is often mutilated. Happiness gets all the credit causing many of us to reject the other side — sadness.
We have the coins of soft and strong, loud and quiet, extroversion and introversion — add infinitum.
Simply put, we destroy these parts of ourselves — destroy our coins — with only one word. It’s a small word and it is a usual symptom of what Jen Sincero calls the ‘either or syndrome’.
The word ‘or’ has hijacked our thinking and, therefore, our lives.
It’s all good and it’s all bad, all at once — everything in us and everything about us.
We don’t have to let ourselves be ruined by any of our coins and we do not have to choose one side or the other.
We can accept both and be both at the same time. We already are both. All we have to do is allow both parts of us to shine through at the same time and accept both completely.
Written by Holly Kellums
Featured Photo by Micheile Henderson
Originally published here :Holly Kellums Feb 22 · 6 min read
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