This article seems to fit in Self Help.  You must surely know who you are in order to become someone different.

That is the whole purpose of Self Help articles.  Motivate you, make you think, make you see the possibilities.

You can become a better person any time you decide to do so.  You and only you can make the changes you dream of having in place.

A Fine Line

It is a fine line between eating too much and just enough. What is the balance between exercise and rest? Where is the balance between being too lenient with your children or too strict?

Is it all perception or is there a "standard"?

Some things are simple. You don't cheat on your spouse. You don't beat your children or verbally abuse them. If you are losing weight you walk more than you sit. If you are honest you don't tell lies. You don't commit murder and you don't steal.

Those things are big broad lines. Right and Wrong.

But it is the fine line that occupies my mind. When does loving someone cross that fine line? When you are too lenient with your children and they grow up without the skills to respect other people or earn a living - is that really love? How do you raise independent children and at the same time protect them from harm?

When you abuse your own mind, self respect, and health is that not the ultimate denial of love? Can you teach respect if you do not get respect? When you abuse yourself, do you not invite the abuse from others? If you allow your own health to fail, are you not committing suicide on a slow track?

Women have traditionally been cast in the role of the self-sacrificing saintly person. And true enough many women do cast themselves in that role. Some take great pride in that role and will tell you over and over how much they have sacrificed. When you cross the line and begin to brag that you are a martyr, are you?

We all know men who have taken on this role as well. The man who works two jobs to support his family and life style. He never takes a day off. He never rests. Is he really doing his family a favor working himself into an early grave? Has he crossed the line between what is needed and what is wanted?

What about the single mom who works a full time job and then goes home to try to clean and cook. Is she so busy trying to support her family that she forgets to live with her family? Is she so worried about her children not having everything a two-parent family has that she crosses the line to over-indulgence?

Children grow up so quickly and they are like sponges, just absorbing everything around them. They will repeat the patterns they have learned. The best way to teach is by example. There is an old saying "everyone is an example - either good or bad."

What kind of example are you? Are you teaching a well-rounded, multi-faceted life of health and joy? Or are you teaching the other side of the line - strife, worry, lack and anger?

It is never too late to change. You can teach yourself new tricks. You can start to see the wonderful abundance you already have in your life and you can share that appreciation with your family.

Are you seventy? Have you written your memoirs? You have a perspective that a younger person can never have. You can share your adventures and your education on how you learned self-worth and joy. You can share the dangers of crossing over those lines.

Are you just entering into the grandparent phase of life? Have you realized that there is so much different you want to do with these children than you did with your own? Share with your children what you would like to do differently with their children. More important - share why you want to do it differently. Cross the line of silence and communicate.

The greatest advantage of age is the ability to see that most things that happened were small and unimportant in the long run.

Perhaps that is why we are allowed to grow old - to share with the young the truly important things in life.

Things like how to take care of your body because it is the only one you get

and how to share yourself because that is a true demonstration of love

and how to live one day at a time

and how "things" don't matter so much because only memories last forever.

A fine line, a broad line, we cross them every day. I think perhaps, we re-draw those lines many times during our own lifetime. Perhaps we just need to acknowledge that good and bad are just two sides to the same coin and it just depends on which side we are looking at that drives our judgment and our actions.