A Li'l Bit of This, A Li'l Bit of That!

When we read Shakespeare during school, what struck most people were the famous speech of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the monologue of Hamlet in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. These struck me as well. But there was one more dialogue that struck me hard and it’s something I have found to be true as I traveled the way of life. This dialogue is given below:

The Merchant of Venice

SCENE 2.

Belmont.
A room in PORTIA’S house

[Enter PORTIA and NERISSA.]

PORTIA.

By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.

NERISSA.

You would be, sweet madam, if your miseries were in the same abundance as your good fortunes are; and yet, for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing. It is no mean happiness, therefore, to be seated in the mean: superfluity come sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.

PORTIA.

Good sentences, and well pronounced.

NERISSA.

They would be better, if well followed.

PORTIA.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree; such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple.

If you have read The Merchant of Venice before, I am sure that you remember this conversation. I still recall my dear English teacher explaining these lines. She did this with so much clarity and impact that the lessons still remain etched in my mind. I never would have thought at that point of time that English lessons would become something I would fall back on to answer some difficult questions in life. Nerissa says (and I have marked it in bold): It is no mean happiness, therefore, to be seated in the mean. When our teacher explained this in class, she said that the word ‘mean’ can have three meanings: 1. Offensive, selfish, unaccommodating, nasty, or malicious (You are so mean!) 2. In the middle (The mean of a set of numbers) 3. Of low quality or inferior. (I paid no mean amount for those shoes). Keeping this in mind, what Nerissa says is that “It is not inferior happiness to be seated in the middle”. Which is what I would like to discuss here. The beauty of being in the middle. And using the same, I would also like to discuss another principle that I hold very close to my heart: “Everything is relative.”

Whatever we may discuss here, I am sure that I can prove to you that it’s best to be in the middle. Let’s take happiness, for instance. That’s something you’ll always want. But what’s happiness without sorrow? If you have not experienced sorrow, how can you measure the true value of happiness? You experience the beauty of happiness because of the sorrow that you may have undergone at another point of time. And therefore, a fulfilling life would be one in which you have a good mix of happiness and sorrow. A person who has reasons to be happy always may not be able to value it as much as someone who has saddening experiences as well.

The principle of relativity also comes up here. The definition of happiness will be different for different people, simply because of the limits to which people experience happiness and sorrow. Something that makes one person excessively happy may generate a muted response from another. This difference comes only because of the experiences that they may have gone through.I have always noticed that people have a tendency to crave for something that they don’t have. For example, there are some people who, having parents who love them to the core, wish that their parents left them alone. And then there are people with busy parents who wish they had some time for them. When you have something, you often, if not always, want something else.

But what people should realize that being in between is best. You get a bit of both the worlds, making you enjoy both of it. You access all the ‘good’s and the ‘bad’s of both sides.
The best instance is that of wealth. A person who is poor knows the value of having a place to live, good health, food, clothes, etc. A person who is very rich doesn’t have any value for all these things. And a third person who is somewhere in middle knows those times when he had a little and he also knows of times when he had a lot. Just think who’s life is actually the richest.
It’s no mean thing to be in the mean!