In-Character Epiphanies
Okay, sorry for abusing your eyeballs like this with IC mental wanderings, but I finally had some details of my young Jedi's mindset and comprehension-style gel this morning, and I wanted to get it written down somewhere I could find it again, since it's a few weeks until our next session.
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What does being a Jedi mean to me? How the blazes am I supposed to know? I found this thing in my backyard, after all the rest of them were gone, and I've been making it up ever since then, and being told I'm doing it wrong since about five minutes after that.
All right, though. Seriously? The Jedi talk about balance, and how that's their reason for being - but the thing that doesn't get brought up, at least not to me, is the fact that there's more than one kind of balance.
There's the balance that comes from stillness - from not moving at all. And that's not the easiest, but it's the simplest, and it seems to be what they were aiming for with their whole philosophy of not caring and not loving and not hating and not interfering.
There's the balance that comes from unity, too - from everyone believing the same thing, behaving the same way, moving in the same direction. It's a stable, balanced place, and it sounds like that's what the Jedi Council was.
But.... I wasn't there, I don't know, but it seems to me like they lost the idea of the balance of harmony - of having different influences and ideas and actions, maybe in equal parts, each keeping the other from overwhelming the person, or the group, or the world.
It's like music. Stillness is silence - and that's a kind of music all by itself, yeah, but it's just one thing. One sound, or lack of sound, and there's nothing else it can be. And unity - that's one instrument, or one performance made all by only oboes, or only strings. And it can be beautiful, and there are more things you can do with it, but even so, there's a limit to how many different sounds you can make and songs you can play, and there are whole kinds of sounds and songs that will never happen and, if you're not careful, you'll forget about.
But harmony - when you have all of the instruments playing and all of the voices singing - then you can do just about anything. It's the hardest, because it's the balance of constant change, and if one person is out of tune it can throw things off, and everyone has to move to make up for it. But if you do it right, it's the strongest and the most powerful. And it's the only kind of balance that includes all the others. There can be pieces of harmony that are still and silent, and times where everything is in unison... but it doesn't have to stay there.
So. I think... that's what being a Jedi means to me. Finding the balance that includes, instead of excludes. Thinking about what we can do, instead of what we can't. And then, I guess, finding the places where other forces would destroy that harmony, and trying to bring things back into tune again.
Of course, the Masters will probably tell you that I'm wrong, and that being a Jedi is about your lightsaber, or never having fun, or memorizing the code. I don't know. Ask them, and they'll give you a better answer. For me, though... this is what I see. You'll probably see something else, when you start looking inside yourself.
Good thing that in harmony there's room for that.