For Friday, April 19: Balance Beam

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. Jonathan Safran Foer

We walk a balance beam when we do things to protect ourselves. If we build walls to protect ourselves from painful things and people then we have also erected walls against happy things and people. Oh we might have the intention of the walls being removable or partial but the reality is they aren't. A wall is a wall and when we feel the need to protect ourselves we build it at the cost of living a full life. Life is fullest when there is a balance of happiness and sadness. If we want the full life we must walk the balance beam between the two and not give in to the temptation to protect ourselves to the point of living a lackluster life. When we learn to embrace the sadness that leads to fuller happiness we navigate the balance beam with perfection.

Comments

Call it a Day

The literal use of this phrase hails from 1838 when the phrase originally was "call it half a day" to mean leaving work early. (source) The modern use of the phrase is to indicate ending something due to false sense of accomplishment.

More bang for your buck

This phrase was used a lot in 1953 but an earlier citation puts it at 1940 in a Metals and Plastics Publications advertisement. Read about it here . The phrase means you get more for your money.

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

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