Today on my way home I walked into a girl that was walking toward me from the opposite direction. Like, walked right into, not like, "Oh, I ran into so-and-so today." Why would I do such a thing? Because I was walking, dammit, and in a bad mood to boot—and this girl was walking with two of her friends, and the three of them were walking side by side, taking up the entire width of a narrow-to-normal sidewalk under a freeway, and what would she have me do, step off into the road and get hit by oncoming traffic? I don't think so.
So I walked right into her and didn't even say sorry.
Ha! I am such a jerk.
Actually that's only part of the story. I had one of those experiences today that, even as I was living through the moment I was thinking to myself, "Self, what is the matter with you? Why can't you just play nice and go along with the flow? Why must you be a naysayer and make other people feel uncomfortable? You're just ruffling feathers without accomplishing anything productive."
But did I listen to myself? Noooooooo.
I was talking with some people and we were trying to decide on something, something so simple that had really already been decided and that people mostly felt happy with. And I just... couldn't feel happy about it the way they did. So being my stubborn self, I flipped the table over and stormed out of the room, though not without pulling a total Half Baked "I'm out!" declaration.
OK, not really.
But really. Some character in Captain America: Civil War quoted someone who said something like, "Compromise on the things you can, and don't compromise on the things you can't". Or, as Song Liling says—"We must conserve our strengths for the battles we can win."
But what do I do when I can't tell one from the other? What if god never granted me the wisdom, always, to tell the difference? How do I know which battles to fight and which battles simply to lie down and die?
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