Ideals. I'm a person who has an ideal image in mind for everything, acts in accordance to them, and is bounded too much by them.





This obssession for ideals manifests itself in the way I expect myself and others to perform. The ideal guy. ideal girl. ideal partner. ideal relationship. ideal friend. ideal son. ideal musician. ideal blackbelt. ideal basketballer. ideal scholar. In these areas, this expectation makes sure I perform to a certain standard, certainly. They act as guidelines, as targets, as lighthouses, providing a clear direction in which I should progress. But it also does the opposite. The knowledge that these ideals exist, in addition to the fact that more often than not I fail spectacularly in trying to meet them, cripples my confidence and forces me to act more cautiously. I hide my weaknesses. I show only the parts which conforms to my ideals. And I'm starting to realise, this is constricting me in more ways than I can imagine.





But there's a wild card that provides escape from this, and it is the realization that in Life, everything is free play. I call this "Reality".

Reality is the realization that the world is not flat. That when it comes to dealing with Life and Humans, 1+2 is equals to 3, but its also not equals to 3 as long as you can come up with a creative enough reason to convince. Its the stage where ambiguous and intangible properties such as charisma, innovation, proactivity, flexibility, versatility, persuasiveness, empathy, maturity etc etc comes into play. What are you supposed to understand when someone tells you that they can "click" with you? What exactly is a "love-hate relationship"? What is "street-smart" and just how useful is it? How do you define whether a person is "mature", or whether he provides a "sense of security"? These are things you do not understand. You simply "get" it. In the Real world, Reality is everything, but its also one thing -- that nothing is definite. Reality can be uplifting in the sense that it gives us a chance to be creative and reinvent ourselves, making a break from a fixed set of Ideals. But Reality can also be daunting because it forces us to face the fact that we are seldom, if not never, adequate enough to fulfil our Ideals. Indeed, the common result of overdosage of Reality is the forsaking of Ideals.

Yet in my view, Ideals and Reality share a relationship similar to that between yin and yang. To quote from my previous post, they are "one of those qualities that is best meted out in proper dosages". Too much of Ideals draws clear and unforgiving lines onto the terrain, giving fixed, conventional and approved standards to follow, and these lines can be restrictive, stifling, even. But too much of Reality translates into the absence of lines on the map such that a sense of directionlessness starts to form. The key then, is balance.

In this regard, I am without a doubt a bit off balance -- even now, I tend to lean towards the side of the Ideals.