black white & gray or ‘no right answer’

black white gray=========

“In the course of your education you’ve always been taught to look for the right answer but you must also know that in life sometimes the right answer is that there isn’t one.”

Mr. Feeny <Boy Meets World>

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So. I almost called this “when there is no right answer.” Here is what I know for sure about ‘right answers’ having been in the business world for too many years to count — there is rarely one answer to the question, or challenge, or whatever. There are multiple “right” answers to just about everything. Shit. Sometimes they can even all be wrong answers (or degrees of wrong), but you still have to pick one.

That said. If I want to get philosophical, that makes me wonder if anything is certain or concrete anymore.

I will say that, well, maybe I really am getting old, but black & white seemed clearer to me years ago. In fact, some of my past team members may remember the “McTague good – bad scale.” I would often simply sum up something by saying “well, on the McTague good – bad scale, well, that would be good.”

<or bad when appropriate>

Maybe that was simply the delusional less experienced youth speaking.

These days I would shift the scale to a rating instead of an unequivocal good or bad.

Is there truly an unequivocal non debatable good and bad?

Or a right and wrong?

How about truth or lies? <where omission can be deemed a ‘lie’>

Or is it all just mixed together and upon us to decide for ourselves?

And how about this. Let’s say we decide for ourselves, judge our own actions, but another person, or people around you, has a different judging scale.

Uh oh. What happens then? Who is right or wrong?

<thought: maybe there is a new business idea here where everyone carries a little card they can hand someone before speaking which outlines the boundaries of their ‘personal right & wrong’ scale>

Anyway. Does the end really justify the means when it comes to good or bad or right or wrong? Is it your end or ‘their end’ that really matters in your own black or white judgment?

It all certainly makes you discard almost any thought of ‘is everything either black and white’, but possibly worse is that you sit back & think: ‘is anything black or white’? Or is everything somewhere in the middle, in the gray?

Wow.

My head hurts.

While I believe we all know some things, or something, is black and white it certainly starts making you understand the world is built in shades of gray. That in the world everything becomes negotiable, flexible or left to interpretation – including knowledge, truth & facts.

Maybe that is life. Because the reality in day to day life is sometimes we are forced to bend the truth or sometimes transform it because we’re faced with things that we did not choose to happen, but are demanded to deal with it. We attempt to bend what we know to fit into whatever new context we are in. Unfortunately, the past, nor knowledge, doesn’t bend very well.

Therefore, sometimes, ‘bending the truth’ simply catches up to us – we see that it isn’t black & white and we are faced with a gray not of our own choice.

So.lines and lives

If we face ‘ethical’ in our day, where is the line drawn? Is it simply, if what we feel is right … well … then it really is?

And if we are forced to do what we think is wrong, should we do it anyway or reap the consequences that come with refusal to go along with the way life pushes us?

Ok.

All of that makes my head hurt.

I know one thing for sure. I would like to be certain of one thing. That somewhere there really is an absolute truth.

Somewhere.

Tricky to find, but there.

Maybe that is the truth.

That it is a journey for truth.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm … I like that <although that is a gray answer isn’t it?>.

Maybe the best way to think about black, white and gray is this way:

“Dawn and sunset are the times when Nature herself is unstable and in flux.

The nocturnal world and the daytime world are meeting, and for a brief time coexisting.

It’s not a neat hard cut, but a blurred, irregular dissolve.

These moments are the seams in existence through which we can get a glimpse of the deeper, fundamentally random, chance workings of a system in which we are only a small, insignificant player.”

Bill Viola

Is it possible we can find solace in this question through some poetic thought like this?

Shit. I don’t know. Most of us would seek to find some more clarity then this. But maybe he is right. Maybe truth coexists in day and night. Blurred by the edges of right and wrong.

Look. I do know no one will ever get “black & white” right all the time. But I imagine that is not a reason I shouldn’t try for the absolute at all times by constantly seeking ‘truth’ whatever that may be.

Make the attempt to find the black or the white.

Avoid accepting the grey even though you know all you will end up ‘buying’ is some version of gray (or some version of black or white).

And maybe this is the best reason of all:indecision coin toss

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“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”

Ayn Rand

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Maybe that is what we have to learn with – gray is evil and we are simply choosing the least evil possible.

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Written by Bruce