Shower Thought 🚿 #7 — The Middle

Photo by Luke van Zyl on Unsplash

“There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something” — Marilyn Hacker (American Poet)

Let’s start with a simple sentence:

The hardest position to ever been in is the middle

Let’s imagine that you’re in a car, you wanna go from point A to point B. What would you do with the gas pedal? 🤔 If you don’t step on it, the car will stay still and you go nowhere. But if you step on it all the way to the end, you’d probably die in a car crash. The state of “driving a car” is to maintain a certain power to step on the pedal so that the car would move. It’s neither null (no step) nor a full (max speed limit) appliance of power, but a back-and-forth effort to manage the momentum of the car — in other words, it’s in the middle.

I’ve been thinking about it lately. People tend to think that the hardest position to reach is the state where you maxed out your actions. But from my PoV, it’s rather the middle that I think is the hardest. To be in a position at the end of the extreme is rather easy. You don’t have to think, you don’t have to “balance” anything. Say you’re a parent, it’s easy to become the “strict mom” whom the children hate or the “hippie dad” whom the children love. But it’s really hard when you can be a lil’ bit of both depending on the situation. For example, you can be a friend but also be respected by your children at the same time.

We see this pattern of being in the “middle” everywhere. In basketball, shooting also needs the “middle” approach, not the extreme. If you shoot the ball with full power, chances are the ball will hit the backboard and bounce back. If you shoot it with not enough power, the ball won’t reach the hoop at all. At work, it’s easy to be a workaholic or a sloth. But it’s really hard when you can have a work-life balance. In a relationship, it’s easy to be the one who always compromises but it’s a challenge to know when you deserve to be selfish once in a while.

So in this brain-teasing story, I want you to re-contextualize what you’ve known so far by seeing that being in the “middle” is actually the hardest state to be in, not the left and right extreme.

Don’t get me wrong, being in the middle doesn’t mean that you have to excel in all areas. On the contrary, it’s the art of balancing that one’s skill will be tested. This new way of looking into this middle state is fascinating to me. Cause at first is somewhat trivial, yet the truth is the opposite.

So what do you think?