There's a ditch on both sides of the road

As a kid, I used to ride in our giant 1970's van with my brothers and my mom out to the field to take my Dad lunch when he was plowing.  Most of our land is contiguous to our homestead, but we have one place that is 8 miles or so east down a long, straight country road.  One day, instead of driving our normal route into the field through the pasture, we needed to drop the lunch and head to town (oh, glorious day!), so we pulled off the road to wait for Dad to circle back around in the tractor. 

Little did we know that the very tall weeds there obscured a deep (very deep) drainage ditch.  Now, in the Texas Panhandle these are not full of weeds or water very often, but this was a wet year, so it had grown up with weeds which had hidden how deep and dangerous it was.  So Mom pulls off to the side of the road and within the blink of an eye the giant 1970's van was teetering on the edge of disaster, hanging from a cliff over a drainage ditch.  Luckily, my Mom's panic was allayed by a man driving by who took to rescue us from certain death (it was only three feet down).  By the time the tractor made it's way around the field, Dad reminded Mom that of course there was indeed a culvert there that had always been there - didn't she remember? This did not please her.

Generally ditches are used in one of two cases: either to avoid something bad  (say, a car passing another car in oncoming traffic and they cut it a little close) or after something bad has already happened (when there are flashing lights behind you and the man in the Ray-Bans asks you to pull over).  I almost had a convergence of these two circumstances south of Valley Mills, pulling over to let others pass me and almost hitting a highway patrolman who had someone pulled over in the ditch right in front of me. I think we both saw our lives flash before our eyes that day.

I say this sometimes when I refer to problems with extremes.  There are fundamentalists on both sides of all issues.  More often than not, they have more in common with each other than anyone in the middle.  There are problems with almost every area of human life related to extreme overuse and extreme underuse of our bodies, nutrition, work, liesure,....  Exercising too much leads to injury.  Exercising too little leads to heart problems.  Eating too little leads to digestive problems.  Eating too much leads to obesity.  Working too much leads to relational dysfunction.  Working too little leads to poverty.  Too much free time results in bad choices related to boredom.  Too little free time makes you unavailable for spontaneous fun.  When the issue of extremes comes up, I always say "There's a ditch on both sides of the road."  More often than not, people will stop and say, "Yeah, that's true!" 

The thing with life on extreme terms is that you can only be there for so long before the drainage culvert of death catches up to you.  That's when you're going to need someone to swoop in to rescue you.  When that happens, I hope your road is easy to get back on and someone kind heps you back to the middle.