Living between the lines

As I write this, I have just come back from my gym visit. While I was parking another guy drives in. There were 4 parking spaces, clearly shown by white lines. What does he do?

He parks with a white line going through the middle of his small car, hence taking two parking spaces.

He looked sensible, so I can only assume he doesn’t regard the rest of us as important in his life. Complete disregard for any other gym visitors.

I was tempted to ask him if I had taken up two spaces and thus left him no other spot to park in how he would have felt. But he was bigger and fitter-looking than me, so I chickened out. I may be old but I’m not daft !!!

As I sat on my rowing machine in the gym I wondered how that kind of behavior would play out if we all took that principle as a norm, in various aspects of life.

“If I’m ok then then I don’t care about other people.”

What if we all took that attitude in life? What if we all did things that satisfied ourselves to the detriment of others? I’m all in favor of doing things that make me happy, and feel the same for everyone else, however if I step up on the back of another to put him down intentionally, then is that right? Is it fair? Is it moral?

No, it is not.

As we get older, luckily, we start to see life in a different light than when we were younger. We are more understanding, more mellow, we take our time to react and I think in general we appreciate others, and their efforts, much more. I think that’s great. I think we should always reach out and lend a hand if we can, and especially if we can help someone who can’t otherwise help themselves. But if we do so to merely help ourselves then we are doing it for the wrong reasons.

There are rules in life.

We may not like them – we may not like some of them, we may not like all of them, but to maintain stability in our community we have agreed they exist and broadly-speaking we have agreed to work with them – in other words we have agreed to live and conduct ourselves “between the lines”.

Unfortunately, today we live in societies where disgraceful behavior, outside the lines, is condoned by society at large, mainly due to some form of political correctness. In other words, we are scared that some authority, or social media perhaps, will attack us for commenting on obnoxious behavior. We would be the victim while the perpetrator is protected under some bizarre rule that some idiot has just made up or concocted out of thin air.

And we allow it to happen.

Then some youngster smarty-pants tells us that we are too old, and our old-fashioned standards are out of date. No they’re not!!

Standards, rules, politeness and so forth were all handed down to us as we were growing up. They have lasted for decades, if not centuries. and have stood the test of time. They are good and generally support the best interests of society at large. Yet there will always be fools who are determined to make a name for themselves and step outside the boundary.

Do what your mum tells you and you won’t go far wrong.