Moments of Weakness

Sometimes, when I write, I have an idea first about which I start putting my thoughts down in a word doc and sometimes, I have simply a title that has come to me literally “out of the blue,” and then I start thinking about things and stuff that relate to this title. Either way is fine for me but I find coming up with the title first as being the most difficult with which to get started.

But first, I must, explain the origin of “out of the blue.” According to some English scholars the idiom is a derivation of an old idiom "a bolt out of the blue" or “a bolt from the blue” which refers to a completely unexpected and surprising act, like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. But, please don't confuse that in any way with “feeling blue,” which could have also come from “out of the blue,” but it didn't, however, that is another relatively long story that I will deal with later.

While I did get temporary sidetracked, one could say that moments of weakness can and oftentimes do come from “out of the blue,” and sometimes appear or result when we are in fact “feeling blue.” However, I want to discuss moments of weakness not how they can sometimes spontaneously arrive.

If one were to perform an Internet search (which is usually done using the Google search engine) which I did, one would discover (like I did) that one link list over 300 quotes that deal with the word “weakness” and another link offers the impression that the Bible, in fact, is loaded with numerous situations that revolve around this concept “moment of weakness.” And, I would suspect that we are all smart and/or intelligent enough to read for ourselves and discover or uncover all the parameters of this phrase and how it comes about.

Yet, we ALL (sooner or later) still continue to experience Moments of Weakness, no matter how physically or mentally strong we thing we are or no matter how spiritual or religious that we think we are.

Why?

• We have Priests who continue to molest young boys
• We have professional athletes who continue to molest female
• We have males who continue to use physical and verbal abuse at home
• We have alcoholics and drug addicts who “fall off the wagon”
• We have male/females who have extramarital affairs
• We have ministers getting busted for DUIs
• We have people with handguns killing others
• We have employees stealing from their employers
• We have cyber hacking of bank and social media accounts

There are no easy answers here for any of these situations, but they are ALL a result of moments of weakness that always results when we cannot control or perhaps do not want to control our actions.

Moments of weakness always arrive at the doorsteps of TEMPTATION which can only be opened by the one who lives inside.

So, what is temptation?

Temptation is nothing more than a desire (brought about by someone or something else) to do something that is wrong or unwise which just about every that doesn't fall under the heading of doing what is right.

And, we all know that the biggest tempter of all times is the DEVIL... and without being too disrespectful to the devil, let me say that as soon as I wrote this down, my first thoughts went to Flip Wilson and the character of Geraldine Jones whose boyfriend's name was “killer” and whose favorite phrase was “the devil made me do it.”

On the other side of this issue is Marcus Geduld who claims he has been studying this area of psychology for over 35 years and there is no such thing as having a “moment of weakness.”

Now Shut the Door!!!

Mr. Geduld claims that there are mental programs that are constantly running in our minds that say to do this or not to do this and that they fight among themselves like artificial intelligence that learns and that the program (or force... my word) that can out argue the other one wins and that then is the direction that our behavior goes.

I must admit that this is a relatively interesting opinion and bears further investigations however, I don't think it will help us much in resolving this issue.

So moments of weakness happen because of temptation and that temptation can take place externally or internally, that is to say that others can influence us or we can influence ourselves.

There is a whole mess of reasons as to how and why we can be influenced by others but this idea of being influenced by ourselves is going to be a difficult one to handle, address, and solve on our own which is exactly what most of us try to do.

When we start talking about ourselves, then we get into a concept called “mental toughness” which always or should I say inevitably leads us into “will power.”

I am not sure what “mental toughness” means but every time I hear the phrase “mental toughness” I think of James Bond being played by Daniel Craig when he was strapped down to a seat-less chair and the “devious” criminal had this leather sling that was weighted down by some type of lead-like device and after it was swung around a few times the lead-like weighted end of the sling went under the chairs and crash into Bond's “balls.” It hurts me to even think about this... I can just imagine that Bond's sex life was never the same after that incident.

Whereas “will power” depends, at least in my opinion, upon one's ego, level self-confidence and level of self-esteem as to whether or not his “will power” is strong or weak.

Of course, when I look at this “will power” issue from an age perspective, I would suspect that age impacts moments of weakness brought about by a loss of “will power,” that is to say that I would suspect that “will power” decreases with age.

I suppose that incredible strength can be exhibited in moments of weakness or perceived moments of weakness as was the case in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and I would also suggest that his moment of weakness was more of a sacrifice than a suicide because I cannot imagine anyone being willing to let himself be murdered... however, without that murder, we would not have Christianity.

I really do hate to end this article here but it just seems like the right thing to do given the direction of this article and the way it ended up which is not how I had intended it to be when I began.