Compromise

Originally written in Aug-1990 in personal diaries

If you act against your will, you are of your own opinion still….

Compromise, Sacrifice… big words. Made to be too noble, too selfless (or is it helpless!) in literature and in spoken language. What actually is compromise? Simply the action of putting a black piece in a jigsaw puzzle because it fits; even though you wanted to put a golden one. It is the same thing as changing decision no. 10 because it does not match either decisions 1 to 9 or the circumstances in which the decision is being made. Is there any sense to it, then, when we say, 'Had the situation not been such, I would have done so and so…'. Of course you would have opted for something else. Decisions and choices are made in the first place to deal with situations. When you say you had to compromise, you simply mean to say that you had to forego something because it was not congruent with your more important wants or with your general life pattern.

Compromise can be expressed as an exhibition of one or more of the three types of weaknesses - want weakness, understanding weakness or courage weakness. Why did you want the golden piece at all, when you knew it would interfere with everything in the picture? Or was it that you were not able to understand pre-ante that the golden piece would not fit? Your fault, whatever it is!

Let us consider one more analogy before talking of these weaknesses. You are walking towards a beautiful mansion which seems to be at the end of the road. You would cry that you had to compromise if you reach the end of the road and there is a big chasm between you and the mansion. You cannot cross the chasm without leaving behind everything that you have; hence you settle for a small hut on this side of the chasm. A want weakness would be if you are crying because even after knowing the situation, you inherently want the mansion. You may be cribbing because you were not able to see the chasm in advance (understanding weakness).

What you actually crib about is the past, the price you have to pay for these weaknesses, the bylanes that you neglected and missed because your sole concentration was on the mansion, the idea that those bylanes may have led you to at least a decent bungalow. In the jigsaw puzzle analogy, you now have to use the black piece because you missed the brown, which fits much better, because you were concentrating only on the golden.

There is another way of looking at it, the point of view of courage weakness. In this, compromise is defines as the lack of courage to change the whole picture to make the whole golden; and instead settling for black. Or the lack of internal strength which would enable you to leave everything on the road and try to cross the chasm, with a spirit, "Lets see what happens?". A person who has this courage can also be said to be compromising his everything for that one mansion, but you would not hear this from him. He has made a choice, he knows what he wants, and does not see his action as a compromise. He would say, "If compromise is a synonym for decision, yes, in that case, I have made a compromise". Compromise is a term he would despise, as it is the same as the expression, "Oh! Poor me, I was not given the best of all the worlds", or "I am persecuted when I am not allowed to have my cake and eat it too:.

So do not compromise, decide. Have what you want to have in life.