Choosing battles

We’ve heard the good advice: choose your battles.

This is helpful in our personal relationships, in our work interactions, and in our general engagement with the world.

And. We should choose our internal battles, too.

Some parts of our interior are not worth resisting; it’s not worth the fight.

(Even as I write this, I can feel myself squirm. Can I really accept what I consider a personal flaw? Can I say, “I’m not going to attend to that?” It’s not a comfortable feeling.)

This is not to say: abandon self-improvement.

Rather, it’s a caution: all battles have a cost. Even internal battles. We can’t fight all of them. We can remain aware of the issues, but we don’t always have to fight.

Remember: the reason we don’t fight every battle is so we can address the battles that are indeed worth fighting — external and internal.