Day: April 22, 2009

It’s easier to take a drastic decision than to be sensible enough to know the limits of an action. The lack of measure is an old plague, growing in intensity and spreading more and more. It’s not new, but it’s gotten worse in the last two thousand years or so. And it’s steadily growing.
The vicious circle of needs is what makes man so miserable. It’s a limitless maelstrom: starting to appraise necessities from the very first day and keeping on increasing the amounts of them, literally from cradle to grave; or reaching a breaking point and rejecting everything, like Thoreau in the forest. But rejection is just another form of unbalance. The measured man – oh, so rare to find! – does not need more and does not need less, either. Justness isn’t a burden to him, it’s the unbreakable flow in the currents of his spirit. Aureae mediocritates are not of this world. They’re otherworldly and singular, almost closer to the realm of non-existence than to that of existence. Nature itself has its dose of superfluities and we’re merely mirroring and magnifying them as we do with a lot of other things that started as natural and ended as human.
The sense of measure is not something acquirable with perseverance, focus and will. It can hardly be faked. Most of those considered balanced persons are mostly persons tending to the less than to the more, which is probably better than the opposite, but it’s not quite as possessing the sense of golden mean. Taking away the excesses is not as easy as to accumulate, especially when consumerism is what the majority of us knows better and is more comfortable in. But denial is another form of frenzy, though maybe less deadly. We admire so much those plunging themselves with majestic fortitude of spirit into self-inflicted deprivations: we call them saints and adorn their heads with glowing halos or we call them heroes and sculpt their features in stone and neural continuity. What’s so good in pampering yourself with one excess instead of the other? The one who stands in the right middle, not in mediocrity as we moderns intend it but in the classic acception of mediocritas (in mediocritas stat virtus, isn’t that so?): that is the deserving one. But how can minds leaning toward unceasing distraction as ours discern what stands in the middle? We clearly see and feel attracted by extremes and are blind to the rest, to the freedom of the one that limits himself. Sensible limits are not constraints, excesses are. Excesses have the power to enslave through the illusion of self-determination. I can more so I need more, and more and less are actually the same point in a circular spectrum; the freedom resides in the ability to recognize the limits of need and moving about inside those limits, not trying unceasingly to enlarge the circle till we’re not anymore the cogitating center of it, but just a mere speckle in a crowd of burdening exigencies.
This said, it’s probably useless to mull over the idea of something unattainable. Faking is always a possibility and with a right dedication one can even get close to something resembling the golden mean. But who’s so crazy to dedicate himself to go after a fake, especially when it’s not very likely that the outcome will be rewarding at all?