Lining Up

“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.”

~ Jim Hightower

Variations upon this quote seem to come up a lot in the words of different people, but I thought the dead fish was a nice touch. Or at any rate, it made me laugh.

I found this quote while I was thinking about this observation My mom once made after parking her car. She’d just gotten out of the car when she noticed that her car wasn’t aligned with all the other ones in the parking lot. She thought about adjusting it, but looked down and saw that actually, her car was the only one that matched up straight with the lines on the ground the marked the parking spaces. It was everyone else who was slightly slanted.

Afterwards, she told me that she thinks maybe those cars show you something about people. When everyone else is doing something a certain way, people have a tendency to follow along. And when you don’t, you’re the one who stands out as having done something wrong even if, in fact, you’re the only one doing the right thing. Sometimes, it’s just so easy to fall in line.