Worth Considering

Unequally Yoked blogger Leah Libresco offers an interesting idea that's based on some thoughts she had a few weeks ago, flipped over on the other side.

Libresco, in the earlier post, transposed the idea of "gateway drugs" to behavior. There's stuff that we know is illegal, and there's also stuff that may or may not be illegal but which is close enough to the actual illegal stuff we should shy away from it as well.

She used an example of police officers who used excessive force in an arrest. There are some behaviors -- striking a restrained restrained suspect who is no longer resisting, for example -- that are illegal. But there are other levels of force that are in kind of a gray area. Even if they are not actually illegal, they get very close and might be considered illegal in some circumstances, crossing the line into brutality. Wise, professional and well-trained officers will generally try to avoid those behaviors as well, since they will be less subject to misinterpretation and less likely to cross over the line by mistake.

In this post, Libresco considered what kind of behaviors might be close to something that you wanted to do, which might become gateway drugs towards accomplishing those. It's really an interesting idea, because it prompts us to take a serious look at how we'd like to live our lives and plot out the steps we take to get there.

The progressive character of the 12-step program could be seen this way. It looks at alcohol or whatever substance is being abused as a failed attempt to cope with life. The goal of all twelve steps is to successfully cope with life, and each step engages behavior that gets closer and closer to that. The earlier steps remove the failed coping mechanism of the abused substance, and the remaining ones are designed to try to help repair as much damage as possible and then the latter ones to better handle new troubles as they arise.

Either way, I'm glad Libresco kept worrying at her earlier thoughts and came up with the new view. It'll be worth thinking about.