Thoughts on the difference between right and wrong

Author's note: I wrote this several months ago, in response to a decision a friend made in her religous convictions. I wanted to place it here as this space becomes more and more used.

So, I've been thinking about our emphasis on doing "right" versus doing "wrong." Basically, I've felt like a failure recently, but I know that it really wasn't my fault. What caused me to feel this way?

Ok, I think that we are obsessed with being right. Not really obsessed in the sense that I can be obsessed with a certain recording artist, but in the way that affects our worldview. Think about it. When we are children, what are we trained to do in school? Find the right answer, for whatever reason. (I liked being right for the sake of being right. Some kids just wanted the grade.) How did our parents rear us? It varies from household to household, but I would generally say that parent reared us up to do the right - i.e., morally, politically, socially correct "thing." We are fascinated with this search for right-ness. And, in our search for truth and the best way to do things, we disregard everything but the end, even if we don't achieve it.
No wonder I feel like a failure when everything does not turn out the way it ought to have - ought to have according to me. I was mentoring this woman in a lifestyle change that I thought was good, and she decides to go back to how she was before. That was hard. Her decision made me feel like a failure. But, it was her decision. Nothing I said or did could have changed that. And yet, in my ears I heard, "You didn't try enough. You said something wrong to put her off."

Lies, all lies!

Perhaps we need to re-examine the way we think about our search for truth. I am not against looking for an absolute in our lives. After all, even if we say there are no absolutes, it's a contradictory statement in that the statement itself is an absolute. There must be something. We're just looking in the wrong spot. We seem to be looking for this special knowledge or idea when it might be something more tangible than that. Or we're searching for a certain experience, which is closer, although it has a tendency to be grounded in the search for a certain type of knowledge - emotion, knowledge and satisfaction of doing good. But, it may still be more real than that. It may be grounded in our everyday decisions, in our interactions with each other. The truth maybe unfolding right before our eyes, and we miss it.

Indeed it is and indeed I do. I type this and listen to Dom singing about a Remedy. I listen to my roommate fiddle in her chair. I can't take that back. It's the truth. It happened. We live in this world of ideas which lends itself to correction - always needing to be fixed because a situation arises that it cannot apply to. And because of this, we are devastated when it happens. I think we need to understand that we and our world is not stagnant, but continually evolving, changing, growing or shrinking, and with that our concept of truth, whatever truth it may be, needs to be malleable, mutable, changeable. Not so much as we lose ourselves to it, (it would be pretty ridiculous if we found out that we no longer needed sleep or burritos or something) but that sometimes our search for ideas needs to take a backseat to our lives. And in that, I would give up my fear of failure, you would give up your shyness, and my roommate would give up her guilt. Heck, cultural misunderstandings would be thrown into the wind.

In understanding this, it seems that what is right and what is wrong become closer or farther. They seem to not run parallel, but that they are either slowly moving toward or away from convergence. That their relationship is not a strict dichotomy, but one that plays with and next to one another. Surely, my friend's decision now might strengthen another decision later. In that way, perhaps her "wrong" decision will converge with the "right" decision later on. To be less obtuse, I'll use an example from my own life. I do not think I would have the same religous conviction today if it were not for my time away from religion. My wrong decision intersected with my right decision at some point or another to make me who I am now.

I just need to make sure I'm on the path to convergence.