Recompense

How you do what you do matters

"To what do I owe the pleasure?", "How much for the fruit?", and "You’re going to pay for that!" are all phrases one might hear any day of the week. All these have something in common – Recompense. Men feel that there is a price for all actions. Negative actions deserve a negative response, equal actions deserve an equal response, and positive actions deserve a positive response.

              

If you show up at someone’s house uninvited, they might ask you, “To what do I owe the pleasure?” (That is, if you are friends). The immediate assumption is that you are there for a reason. Maybe you are their neighbor, and you need to borrow a few eggs. Maybe you’ve come over to bring them a gift. Always they assume there’s a reason for your coming. They might invite you in and offer you a drink, or they might ask what you need first and make a decision as to what to do next.

If it’s the girl scouts at your door asking you to buy cookies you don’t assume they’re going to give you the cookies for free. Automatically, you are approached with the decision of whether the cookies are worth the cash it costs for them. There’s a price. In my opinion it’s a fair trade no matter how much they are this year!

In a negative light, if you were to decide that those cookies are far too expensive, and you make the poor decision to assault the little girl’s mother and take the cookies for yourself, then you will have the negative price of spending time in jail. Like Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

I believe my wife has already written about sowing and reaping in a previous article, so that’s not what I’m getting at. I want to talk about recompense, or "compensation". Everything has a cost or compensation. Fruit in the store has a price, a friend showing up at your door has a cost in time and possibly food, and a criminal action or just a bad decision has a penalty or compensation for that decision. Everything has a price in life.

If my wife asks me to go clean her headlamps I can make a few decisions:

1. Say "ok" and go outside and do it.
2. Yell at her for always telling me to do things and then go outside and do it.
3. Ignore her and not do it.
4. Yell at her and not do it. Etc.

All of those have a different recompense associated with them. #1 probably lands me a good kiss and a smile. #2 ends up in lost fellowship with my wife and lost confidence in my desire to take care of her. #3 forces her to assume that I am lazy and don’t care about her safety on the roads. #4 undermines her confidence that I love her and also shows that I don’t care about her safety.

The point being, we can do what we are supposed to do with a poor attitude, but it will cost more. We can do what we are supposed to with a good attitude and gain the rewards that it entails. It’s up to us. Just something for your brain to munch on.

Keep thinking friends,

Simeon Brazzell.

PS: I chose option #1, buffed the headlamps, and the results were nice.