soul splitting

Another blown-up episode, the biggest yet, involving third parties, the law, and formalities. I've chosen to intervene after the right time had passed. Had I intervened earlier, perhaps the later complications would not have come. And things would not have escalated. But I chose to withdraw. One friend described a similar, albeit more harrowing, experience, when she promptly chose a stand right in the middle of all the action. On the right side.

I'm reading a book about first year at law school, and being a lawyer in general, the author warned of the consequences in believing that the "right answer" does not matter, as law professors so assuredly insists. Rather, one must use reasoning to find support on both sides, and then instantly take the ground from under them by switching to the other army. It's a frenzied back and forth. A chess match played against the self. I relished in it. Now I see why. I see its ugly implications, purple and black like a bruise, in a panoramic and magnified view as I crash back to the real world.

Why do I love not picking a side? Why do I prize the tool--rationality--above the end it is helping to achieve? Detachment. Cowardice. Perhaps a more deeply rooted and subtle vice. I've tested out my principles with the hot iron of reason, but wielding them in the face of the enemy is quite another matter. Who was the enemy? I have a feeling I could know the answer if I wanted. Yet I never approach this last step of the game. Knowing my opponent would mean I would have to spring to action, or forever hold myself as a soul-split being, where even neutral rationality could not save me. I am not a being of action, but only of observation, perhaps even of judgment. But action. Action! Something reserved only for the brave and quick, eludes me. Or perhaps more accurately, I elude it. One day I fear some sort of undesirable event, akin to evil, will be brought into the world because of my allowances, one day I fear I will be defined by moral abdication. People always praise those who helped house the persecuted in the time of Nazism. I always knew I would not be one of them. I live in gratitude that I do not live in trying times, because the test of character will be one I will surely struggle with. And one I have a real possibility of failing.

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