Should we invest in quick fixes that solve today's problems, or dedicate resources to long-term solutions that might take years to bear fruit?
This is the kind of pragmatic challenge I asked myself whenever I'm stuck in a rut with regards to moderation.
Moderation, in this context, can be defined as maintaining equilibrium between competing priorities.
For example, parents weighing between addressing a child's immediate comfort versus building their resilience and independence.
For my case, it's juggling between quick resolutions to current social disputes and building lasting conflict resolution frameworks that could prevent the same disputes from repeating themselves.
It's a challenging question because it assumes as if life always presents "an either this or that situation" for us, without us understanding that binary choices rarely reflect real-world complexity.
In reality, there's hardly ever a situation where we can completely ignore either immediate or future needs.
Doing so always comes at a cost, which one could argue is the basis of makes life an ongoing exercise in judgment and wisdom, through which we experience evolution.
Taking A Detour
Recently, I've more or less defaulted into primarily solving today's problem, albeit not through quick fixes as mentioned in the question above.
Quick fixes are just band-aids masking deeper issues, irrespective of the viewpoint or framework one decides to look at it from.
Now, primarily solving today's problem is a temporal shift that came from realizing that well-solved present challenges tend to create better foundations for future planning.
Besides, when we solve current problems well, we free up mental and physical resources that gets pent up during cycles of incomplete solutions or when going back and forth with partial resolutions.
The process itself of solving immediate challenges contributes immensely into achieving better problem-solving frameworks applicable to "future" situations of similar kind. As in having a number of reference points or a tested methodology we can draw from.
Unclear Atmosphere
For the most part, gazing at the future just brings more headaches, the horizon is foggy to say the least, although certain probabilities seem more likely based on present actions and past patterns.
Persistent healthy habits generally correlate with better long-term health outcomes, just as consistent investment in relationship building usually results in stronger support networks over time.
When we're immersed in a fog of uncertainty, it may be a wiser approach to just address present challenges in ways that leave doors open for future possibilities, rather than trying to perfectly predict and plan for what lies ahead within that state of fogginess.
Over time, we may cultivate the wisdom to recognize how our present actions can serve both timeframes simultaneously, a sort of natural bridge where we can transverse between immediate needs and future aspirations.
In practice, this just basically means taking each day as it comes, but with dual awareness, fixing what's broken now, while considering how the fix itself might become a building block for greater improvements.
Sometimes, I may take a bit longer to solve a present problem, simply because I'm trying to ensure the solution has room to grow and it isn't half baked.
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