Compromise

Co-promising Your Life

 

Does compromise feel inauthentic to you? It did to me. From the time I was little there was always a sense of loss associated with compromise. People have written books about the art of compromise. Supposedly, it’s deemed good to be good at it. It is something experienced early in life that stays around long-term. It is foundational in business and in our family life. It is often a turning point that actually allows decision-making to move forward. Whether at work or at home, when we compromise something important, it feels like giving in or giving up rather than moving forward. And it builds walls rather than a rallying point for action.  

 

Talking with friends yesterday, the word fraud came up and an article I had previously written popped into my awareness. The article was called Tinkering to Get the Fraud Out (June 2007).  I went to the Blog to re-read it and the first two paragraphs jumped out. 

 

Recently, I watched an interview with Brian Dennehy. As he talked animatedly about his long, illustrious career as an actor, one sentence he used grabbed me and I found myself reaching for a pencil to capture the juicy phrase. Of his performances he said he was constantly, tinkering to get the fraud out. As I listened I wondered if we are constantly tinkering to get the fraud out of our lives as well.

 

The answer came in three parts. Prior to awareness of choice our tinkering is automatic and not to get the fraud out, but to survive. We don’t stop to evaluate our attempts to protect and defend ourselves. We just do it. This is actually a free state of mind. From this state of ignorance, we act, from not knowing any better. Despite the free state of mind, nothing in our lives will dramatically change. Life will be predictable. Psychics will have no trouble telling you what tomorrow will look like, because it will look like today. Behaviors will continue status quo.

 

One of my friends broke the word compromise into co and promise. As she said it a light-blub flickered on and I heard, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. Compromise is a two-edged promise. Each of us is promised to God. That is our nature; it is who we are—God’s promise. We are divine beings. For some of us that promise is conscious, for others it is not. Compromise is problematic when we are consciously promised to God and act in ways that protect the mind—our ego.

 

Any time we fail to stand for truth and goodness something within us dies. When we deny or delay God’s awakening within us, a pale of darkness overshadows our Great Possibility. We bow to the small, egotistical mind, allowing it to take greater control of our lives. Our compromise glasses over the light and muffles our divine sound—that pulse within us. We dim. The pulse of Life, carried at our heart’s center, acts as a beacon for all wending their way Home to God. It beats within those who have chosen to undo the tentacles of ego and forgive everything mind has made back to the Holy. The reason for denial or delay doesn’t matter. The result is the same.

 

Once we have heard our inner voice we are forever beyond the state of ignorance, that place where actions spring from not knowing any better. Be happy that we feel the pain of compromise. It is a blessing that numbness has not settled into our bones. A heart breaking is a divine gift. It too is a beacon, a pulse of God given freely to those who walk this path.