Illusion of Stability
Sometimes we plant our feet firmly in hope for stability. Kids, mortgage, bills; the excuses are endless. Yet for all our static behavior life has a tendency to knock us right on our ass. If you’re alive and breathing, then there is no such thing as stability. Not only can your life change at any moment, it’s changing at every moment.
But what about all of the compromises? As stability becomes a value in life, where do we rank that with our other values? Everyone has a ranking of values. Some people will maintain honesty as a value even over friendship. Other people value friendship more and will gladly lie to preserve their friends favor. So what values are we willing to compromise for stability?
Maybe you’re a few months from vesting or just a couple of years from retiring? When do you stop rocking the boat and hope things settle down?
I hope the answer is never. The boat is always rocking whether you want it to or not. The water is guaranteed not to stay calm. Stability often appears as an imaginary value. The problem is not stability itself, but with the values that you compromised for something imaginary.
In my own life and in the lives of people around me, I’ve seen compromises that sacrifice integrity, competence, and honesty all for that illusive stability. I’ve watched good people do bad things, and observed my own bad behavior to make compromises in order to maintain a deceitful status quo. A lifetime of compromising your values and it’s no surprise where otherwise good people with well-intentioned values become bad people based on the ease with which they act out against their own principles.
I can’t speak of a perfect solution. It’s difficult if not impossible to just simply erase stability from our core values. The irony is, we want stability to protect ourselves and the people around us, but as we compromise in favor of stability we end up hurting ourselves and the people around us. My idea is to instead focus your life on the process and not the outcome.
We tend to focus on what we want and our minds fill with imaginary outcomes. Some people want kids and a house, and once they get them they want to preserve them, they want stability. I’ve seen people sacrifice happiness (which in my opinion should be the highest order value of them all) in search for stability. Try instead to focus on the process; on living in your home and raising your children rather than outcomes like kids, house, and bills. Or focus on living a good life rather than imagining a future retirement. Perhaps then we won’t compromise our values and our actions will reflect our good intentions.
Like waking from a slumber
I open my eyes and see clearly
The world around me
My place in it
The present
Where have I been?