My father was an attorney so we had some “law paraphernalia” around our house growing up. One of my favorite things to play with as a kid was the Scales of Justice model that I was repeatedly scolded “was not a toy”.

I knew it wasn’t a toy, but it was a fascinating item to the little girl who loved roaming the house looking for things to put in each side in an endless quest to make the two sides balance. (Whoa, the life metaphor, right?)

Remember in an earlier love note where I talked about holding two truths at one time? The reason that is often hard is because we want to act like a human scale of justice and more often than not, two opposing thoughts don’t balance in our minds.

For instance, if your parents did the best they could based on their own resources and history, but their best was still pretty crap for you and your siblings, that often doesn’t feel like a fair balance.

Maybe you married a person who made life grand when you were 26 but now that you’re 46 things don’t feel so good. That doesn’t mean you were wrong when you were 26 when you thought things were great and it doesn’t mean you’re wrong now when they’re not.

We want everything to make perfect sense; for both sides of the scale to be even. But, in life (like in my childhood living room) that’s almost never the case. Trying to make perfect sense, or have the scales balance can lead us down some dark and even conspiratorial paths lined with confusion, frustration and even anxiety or fear.

The good news is we have a choice. We can choose the dark paths, convinced that we must make our scales balance, or we can let go of the need for perfect reasonable sense and simply accept our truths even if they seem in opposition. We can choose to learn, to grow and to hope rather than sit in the mire of wanting, and never getting, perfect, reasonable balance.

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