Reflections, Pendulums

Daily Meditation 891–8/8/2024

Pendulums swing back and forth in a very wide path, don’t they? Oscillating far to one side, pausing for the briefest moment and then gallivanting to the opposite to repeat.

And yet, despite these two extremes, the average of a pendulum’s movement are exactly at the bottom.

The exact bottom is the average — and the pendulum spends an vanishingly small amount of its real time there!

Isn’t that fascinating?

So too are we similar to pendulums.

Some of us think highly of ourselves. We believe we’re the best leaders, the best husbands or wives, the most attractive, the best endowed.

Yet others hardly think of ourselves, at all. We’re miserably bad at our jobs, terrible parents and spouses, ugly, and worse — at least in our heads…

Here’s the rub: our opinion of ourselves should be an approximate reflection of others’ opinions of us.

We discussed this previously in one of my most read articles. We think astonishingly low (or arrogantly high…) of ourselves, and it’s usually a grossly if not hysterically incorrect opinion.