What is 'righteousness', in your opinion?
How is (your idea of) righteousness achieved?
Does it matter if you fail to achieve (your idea of) righteousness?
Given that RFs reflect a spectrum of thought, l'm interested to hear a wide range of views on this issue.
My impression is that 'Righteous' refers to something that is balanced enough to remain vertical. Righteous, then, is a combination term that means skill among other things. I think a person can only be so good, and if we try to be good to an extreme we can become unbalanced and fail worse than if we had not been good at all. At the same time if we are not good enough we are unbalanced as well. Either extreme leads to psychological problems, time problems, resource problems...various problems.
Imagine living before people had ever heard of 'Gravity'. You'd see balance everywhere, and you might well wonder what principle was behind it. Even today and knowing what gravity is and that it pulls from all directions we still like this concept of balance and apply it to more than flower vases. It is mysterious and wonderful, and its game for application to many areas of life.
In the story of the flight from Egypt, the Israelites are told they must turn neither to the left nor to the right. Solomon's temple has named its right and left pillars. Psalm 1 talks about trees of righteousness, which are upright by means of strong roots.
You can be balanced in different ways. It can be that you are symmetric like a vase, or it can be that you have roots, or it can be that you stay on the narrow path -- that you are humble instead of fat, or that you have just the right amount of wealth neither too little nor too much, or that you ... and so on. There are different kinds of balance.