Living Well

Well, it’s been a month, and the coronavirus is still raging. With the death toll in the news everyday and some extra free time on my hands due to social distancing, I’ve done some deeper thinking than I’ve done in a while. This post is going to wax philosophical and then turn practical – so bear with me!

How then shall we live?

As I look at the news, it strikes me once more how transient life is, even life that isn’t truncated by an untimely death. A few decades – maybe less – and we’re gone. As much as the hours may drag sometimes, the years flow swiftly. How then shall we live?

It isn’t a new question, of course. From before the time of King Solomon, people have been asking what it means to live well. Some argue the entire discipline of philosophy was designed to find the answer to this question. Some philosophers these days are so busy asking convoluted questions, they’ve forgotten how to look for truth. But back when philosophers asked the big questions and really believed they could find answers, they spoke on this subject.

The Answers

Plato and Socrates believed that living well meant seeking for truth, leaving behind this corruptible mortal world to embrace an unchanging ideal. Aristotle believed it meant having balance between the virtues. The Stoics thought it meant pursuing perfection and reunification with the divine.

Lao Tzu taught that we must live in accordance with the Tao, the fundamental law underlying of the universe, which is unseen yet grounds reality, all-pervasive yet personal, yielding yet all-powerful. Confucius said we must rightly order our relationships in accordance with the Law of Heaven. The pagan myths teach us that disloyalty separated us from the divine* and that love, blood, and sacrifice are the way back.

The Answer

Who was right? All of them partially, none completely. The Greek philosophers understood that we lived in a world of mortality and corruption, but they didn’t understand that impersonal ideals and human willpower couldn’t rescue us. Confucius was right; we must be in correct relationship with Heaven and each other. Lao Tzu was right; being in balance with the fundamental order of the world is a mystery and a paradox.

But perhaps, for all the genius of the philosophers, the myth-makers were really closest to the truth. Because the fundamental order of the world is not, as the Pythagoreans taught, mathematical. It is not, as the pre-Socratics thought, elemental. It is personal. The fundamental principles that ground the world are principles of character – the character of Heaven. The character of God. If we are to live in harmony with heaven, we must be reconciled to God. And to do that there must be love, sacrifice, and blood (we’ll talk more about that come Easter).

The Application

So much for the deep philosophical answer – I’ve written more about it elsewhere, if you’re interested. But what about the practical question? The answer is almost absurdly simple; it’s obvious, yet hardly anyone does it.

How do you do anything well? We say practice makes perfect, but that’s a lie. Practice just ingrains what’s already there. Perfect practice makes perfect; lousy practice makes lousy; half-hearted practice makes half-hearted. When I headed to Jordan for a summer for language study, I’d never studied Arabic before. My roommate had been studying for two years – and in two weeks, I knew more Arabic than she did. She had more practice, but I had more intentional practice.

Want to know how to speak Japanese? Practice intentionally. Want to know how to play the piano? Practice intentionally. Want to know how to throw a strong right hook? Practice intentionally. Want to know how to live well? Practice intentionally.**

Live Intentionally

The catch with living, you see, is that we’re all practicing it all the time. You can hardly get away from it. Every day when you wake up, you are going out and spending hours practicing how to live. You can live without intentionality, taking the path of least resistance, letting the world drift by while doing the minimum. You can half-heartedly practice living – and if you do, you will never be much good at it.

Or, you can make the extra effort to live intentionally. You can remind yourself throughout the day to search for opportunities to reach out to others, to show kindness, to spread optimism and hope, to be a light in darkness. It takes energy – intentionality always does. But as long as you’re going to be living anyway, you might as well live well. Because the person you see in the mirror when this life ends will be the person you chose to be moment after moment, day after day.

In short, for all the books (and blog posts!) written on the subject, living well isn’t complicated. It’s just hard. But it’s worth it.

*Specifically, according to the Greeks, the disloyalty of a perfectly-created first woman who couldn’t keep one particular rule – but when she released evil into the world, a promise of hope also came with it.

**Aristotle agrees with me on this, by the way.

“Dirt Road with a Mountain View” by Hardgrave Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0