Poster Talk

Today as I rode down an escalator in Hirosaki, a poster caught my eye. It had a picture of a band, and the caption read "You don't have to feel the shame of letting yourself go, if it pushes you forward".
My first reaction was to object to the phrase "letting yourself go". Most people here have a sense of "enryo" (restraint) and don't like to stand out. Having a little more self-confidence is okay, "but letting yourself go" sounded rather over the top at first.
However, once I though about it, I realized the real problem is, which way is forward? In the current, post-modern climate, "forward" can be any direction a group of people decides it is. "Choose your group, and go for it. Validate your existence by action."
That approach has gotten a lot of people into places they never intended to go. As a lecturer I heard recently said, "Reality is what you run into when you are wrong".
We accept hard-and-fast reality in our everyday dealings with inanimate objects like cars (gas, not water in the tank, please), yet somehow seem to think there are no rules for morals, philosophy, or religion. Each society just makes up their own set of rules, and one is as good as another.
The first words in the Bible are "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth". Rather than being the product of a series of random chemical events, this universe is hand-made by God. Some things work, and some things don't, in morals as well as in engineering. Let yourself go- but only when you are sure where "forward" is.