What Are The Elements Of A Good Life?

A few years ago I had to attend a road traffic accident. It was a dark and dirty November night; two young women had been struck by a taxi and were lying unconscious in the road. Bystanders hung around, shocked, scared, uncertain what to do.

The dismal rain made this a scene of horror and chill. It was unnerving.

Kneeling on the road to help, I was soon drenched with cold rain and shivering until my teeth rattled. Warm sticky blood soaked into my clothes, as I worked on the most critical of the two victims, anxiously awaiting the ambulance. In the poor visibility, my own safety was not assured as unheeding traffic thundered past mere inches away.  I was constantly splashed with icy cold rainwater.

Somehow a brush with death, not necessarily one’s own, is a moment for considering the worth of what one is doing. Fate herself seemed to step out of the darkness and speak. It was a simple clear message which only a fool could fail to grasp:

How we waste our fragmentary and precious lives.

True, I have seen people die many times on the hospital wards. But in a sense that which we see on the wards is a different kind of death to the one which hovered close by in the dismal rain that night. Somehow this was more immediate; – challenging us, as it did right there on the street, mixed up with our ordinary everyday lives. The finger of doom pointed accusatively at two young women. But it pointed at me too…

For there is always that universal reproachful question importuning in all such moments: am I doing the best I can with every moment of this fragile life–truly?

Let us firm these suspicions of inadequacy into neatly phrased, if accusative, questions:

Have we done the best we can with others? (our family, friends, neighbors and strangers) Is there anything that should, at the last, be UN-done? Many of us would like to be remembered fondly for our best achievement; but what if we were remembered solely for our worst act in life—what impression would we leave behind on history?

Are we up to date with our duties? Or have we been shirking those things we KNOW we must do, putting them off for some other more comfortable time that would suit ourselves and not those around us?

Perhaps we can put it all into the one question, most awful of all:

If we knew our last moments were at hand, is there anything we would wish to change?

I know I thought about it again and again in the ensuing days.

That One Thing…

Suppose we were allowed to re-live just one moment from life in the manner we chose? Would it be right to elect the one we enjoyed the most? Or should we choose the one in which we hurt someone else the most and be grateful for our chance to put it right?

There is always one thing that haunts us more than any other. Nobody lives a perfect life but we don’t do too badly usually. Then there is this one event that could so easily negate all that we might have achieved.

If only we could get rid of it. Rewrite the past.

For I aver that everyone has a profound instinctive inner wisdom that allows us to know what should and shouldn’t be part of our code of conduct. Hemingway put it quite bluntly: “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after”. That this “personal imperative” so often gets side-stepped or even overwritten and buried makes it no less real and valid.

How much nearer to our own true nature would we be, if only we listened to this voice and followed its counsel.

Get To The Point, Man

And so finally I arrived at the real question for this meditation, which is:

What are the components of a good life?

I have chosen to invoke courage, love and integrity. Could we not say that these are the components of the inestimable qualities of human goodness? Perhaps it may be possible to make all worthwhile human character attributes from these three key ingredients combined, mixed in various ways and proportions. Would we need anything more—if so, what?

Love: The Mother Of All

So much has been said about love that one might be cautious entering this arena. However, if there is nothing new to say, it is still worth saying this: that anything which can be said about love is not about love.

This echoes the Zen Buddhist teaching that anything which can be said about Zen is worthless and most emphatically NOT about Zen. The word “ineffable” is ascribed to something which simply cannot be put into words. It doesn’t mean there is nothing out there: it does mean that it is so mysteriously not of this earthly place, that that ordinary language is inadequate. The words are not there.

Treading carefully, then, can we say that:

Love is a universal principle of experience, more akin to the imaginary ether of the nineteenth century physicist – something that, if it wasn’t there, damned well ought to be; a sort of underlying matrix that cannot be grasped, touched, felt or manipulated.

The Offshoots

Love is more recognized by what it does and what it causes than what it actually IS. The warm and intimate feeling; that need or desire; just the quickened heartbeat. These are all signs that love is nearby somewhere. But these manifestations are NOT love. The apple which falls is just an apple, not gravity.

Yet we all know gravity is there.

Many qualities stem from love, without necessarily being love. We know that in love there is a sense of cherishment; that is the common definition. That in turn may have sexual overtones, or not.

There is also the intense care and yielding of compassion, which is on occasion is smoldered down to tenderness, that gentler and sweeter principle we reserve for our nearest and dearest. These two loyal and earnest companions make all our lives the richer and more joyful.

They are the harmony to the song of our souls.

But there is something else too, in love. Something bold, great and universal. Something magnificent and awe inspiring we know under another name: truth.

I do not see how it is possible to separate these two great dimensions of living in any way. Are they not both the same thing? Our being is enshrined in what we are; love is what our nature determines. Truth is the exactness of what we know and experience, in other words what we are in being.

Love flees when lies enter the door of our house of happiness.

The Chinese Elements

There is a certain yin and yang here too: Truth has some of the fierceness of the masculine principle and the hard unyielding strength. Love, on the other hand, is feminine, endlessly yielding and gentle. Remember: yin and yang are both aspects, they are not in any sense counter-creations or antagonists. An object without both would be merely one-dimensional, like a one-sided coin.

In other words impossible.

How absurd and paradoxical it would be to have gentleness and femininity, without truth. How savage and cold to have truth without the temperance of love and softness. Where there is any quality lacking, there cannot be truth—truth is whole.

These impossible mutual exclusions and contradictions would cross-over what Gilbert Ryle described as category violations. Here then is a clue to the intimate identities of these two precepts.

One contains the other. One IS the other.

Courage

We need courage to live well. It seems to me that the choices with inherent evil or jeopardy for self and others are the paths which appear easy. These soft options are a short term view, because in almost all situations there is a price to pay ultimately. But few people look very far ahead and foresee ultimate consequences (otherwise why commit evil at all?)

Courage is to do what is honorable for yourself alone. Not because someone is watching.

Courage is so like integrity because it means the nerve to stand up to what needs facing, not to quail in adversity.

Courage is not about fearlessness. There may be great doubt and dread about going forward. Courage means that you do what you know you must. If you can sum up the output end of courage, perhaps it would be that you remain true to yourself.

Lies come from cowardice and fear. But lies also speak persuasively, if dissonantly, of self-dislike and doubt of self-worth. Dishonesty is not being loyal or true to one’s own being. For we are created rich in assurance and integrity. The spirit knows only light and radiant Is-ness. Darkness, deceit and evil come from elsewhere (though these too are creations of the spirit, in attempts to solve the problems of retaining its pure path and getting to where it wants to be).

If there is one easy distinction between the path of truth and the road of lies and dishonesty, it is that the latter seems so easy. It is the route that eschews courage and denies its existence.

This isn’t to make the pathetic gripe that living life properly, the good life, is always hard. But it seems to me, philosophically speaking, that the whole evolution of evil and bad behavior centers around the fact that somehow an “easier” route manifests and we take it, turning aside from ourselves and our real destination.

Thus we may know wrong.

How They Inter-Relate

Integrity brings wisdom and guidance. You cannot have wisdom where lies and deceit prevail. Never. But truth is hard-faced and it must be tempered by love.

Courage attitude of facing what needs to be borne without flinching. It is not “fearless” but it operates despitefear of the consequences.

Even more than that: the necessary grit and resolve to admit what must be said, to allow even the darkest corners of the mind to be exposed. You cannot separate honesty from courage. It is courage which give integrity its fuel. They exist in a spiritual symbiosis.

Love comes into this too. You must hate yourself to resort to lies and hiding. Reversely, those who love themselves (honorably) feel confident in their being and know no need to deceive. A person in this blessed state would no more lie than take poison.

Only with courage and honesty can love prosper. Love is the warm rich powerful reward for good behavior, for knowing what you know is right; for allowing into your heart only that which should be found there.

Integrity is a special degree or category of wisdom.

A Happy Ending

Jacqueline and her friend Gill sustained fractured skulls. Jackie was unconscious for several days but both made a full recovery (one is reminded inevitably of the nursery rhyme: “Jack fell down and broke his crown and Gill came tumbling after…”.

I thank them both for sharing those few tense minutes in their sweet lives, when disaster might have prevailed, but didn’t. It helped me focus more clearly on the issues of right living and how to get more out of the precious lot which is ours all too briefly.

The finger of doom had pointed directly at two young women. But it had pointed at me too; and everyone else there in the crowd of onlookers, standing mutely in the gloomy lamplight, unable to say anything which matched up to the sombre drama.

[And, in case you are wondering, Jacqueline’s Dad paid to have my suit cleaned; it was soaked with blood and face paint!]