A useful moral muscle-building exercise is to try to depart from cliché and move closer to your truth by considering the truth held by others. By doing so, it is argued, we begin to unfold the spellbinding layers that surround our intuitive or reactive sense of what is the truth, which, in turn, nudges us away from our charming and well-cloaked secret weapon - self-deception.
It is said that the truth cannot lie, but if it could, I have no doubt it would lie somewhere near the midpoint between one person’s truth and the other person’s truth. In this way, truth is unlike alcohol and is NOT best served or consumed in moderation. So, if one’s instinctive truth cannot be fully trusted and the other person’s truth is similarly equivocal, then where does the truth lie? While this debate is heated and has been discussed over millenniums by minds much greater than my own, I would like to believe that the key is to find distance from judgment by becoming more open-minded and more willing to learn from a situation as opposed to becoming critical, complaining, and comparing. This is most efficiently accomplished by blending your truth with the truth of the other person and identifying the common ground.
Increasing one’s flexibility toward being concerned about issues beyond self requires expanding one’s perspective about the world, how one fits into the world, what one can offer the world, and what the world can offer right back.
Stepping into our maturity requires learning how to balance self needs with the needs of others. When our background provides us love only through conditional channels, the lesson we learn is that the needs of others are more important than others (others>self). When our past babies us, protects us from all harm, and disallows us from facing hard times, the lesson learned is that the only thing that really counts is self, and the needs of other people takes a backseat (self>others). Alternatively, if life provides us a balance of protection and freedom, transparency and mystery, familiarity and spontaneity, the perspective we learn allows us to balance the needs of both self and others (self=others), which provides us sufficient resiliency to deal with life’s struggles and enough gumption to go out into the world and dazzle.
Liquid morality involves the perspective that others are needed in order to develop self, and an authentic self is required to be available to satisfy the needs of others. This ebb and flow of self to others, others to self is what helps move us toward our true potential. In a sense, by being open to going with the flow of liquid morality what is gained is an opportunity to be more of who you really are and less of who you think you need to be.
