When good enough is not good enough

My sister said something to me the other day that was very wise. She said "when a person is starving, they will eat whatever is available. The moldy bread is preferable to the rotting meat, so after a while, the smell of moldy bread becomes familiar and actually starts to be a sign of things not being so bad. They lose sight of the fact that moldy bread is still moldy bread, not the fresh, wholesome food that the rest of the world is eating. Good enough becomes the norm."

Good enough isn't good enough. Good enough is what the flagging hearts of this world are using for subsistence. Good enough is fatal to the soul. Good enough makes us begin to believe that we can never have any better. Good enough is slow death.

My late father-in-law once told his son "Before you marry a woman, get her good and mad at you. That will tell you a lot about her character". I suppose he had a point there. What people do when they are angry tells you what their insecurities are, what their disposition can be like, what matters to them and what bombs they are willing to drop on you in the heat of a fight. There are other moods that can spell out a person's character in the same way: excitement, sadness, fear. FEAR Fear of the known, fear of the potential loss of emotional connection, fear of the loss of earthly possessions. Fear supposedly tells more about a person than anything. Personally, when I am afraid, I extend my talons and prepare to strike at the source of my panic. I have been wounded in the past, and the default is a defensive posture. I am sure I have hurt the ones I love by my reactions. I will not shy away from this, nor will I try to make excuses. I am what I am. Some folks will suddenly become the salt of the earth and be ultra-sweet because they know that they have done something to incite the ire of those that have instilled the fear. I don't think it is wise to judge a person by their fear reactions, because they are usually not the mode in which people operate most of the time. No, I think for the sake of every humans' sanity, they need to evaluate others based on one main criterion:

EVERYDAY BEHAVIOR

They say that if a person is nice to his friends but nasty to the waiter, that the person in question is not a nice person. The same goes for the person who turns a pleasant fact to the public and then goes home and beats his wife. The customers with whom he interacts in his day to day life may think he is a gentleman, but his wife knows better. Why she stays, well, that probably goes back to the moldy bread. She looks forward to the days when he doesn't beat her as the sweet, desirable blue crust that sustains her life. She can go along very well subsisting on this diet of filth as long as the rotting meat is only thrown at her at rare intervals. What happens when the day comes that she sees a loaf of fresh, hot, succulent oatmeal bread sitting on a cutting board, ready to be eaten? She realizes that maybe there is more to life than that moldy bread and her world is changed forever. The confusion and pain this brings is incalculable, and produces an agony that is sometimes unbearable. Would she be better off never knowing that fresh bread exists? Will she be able to survive with her diet of rot when she knows that the alternative will change her existence forever? Sometimes starvation seems like the only option. If I had the power to change the world, I would give every trapped soul the strength to reach for the loaf of fresh bread and turn their back on the rot.

But that's just me...