It takes practice to look this cool

Anyone who plays guitar (or, as I do, bass guitar,) develops calluses on their fingers where they hold down the strings. It doesn’t take long, maybe a week of playing a little every day; but that can be a painful week, and the strings feel like they’re cutting into the soft flesh at the tips of your fingers. It’s especially bad if you only play occasionally, because any calluses you develop fade away when you’re not playing, so they have to develop all over again.

Whenever I pick up the bass again after neglecting it for a month or so, it’s not just the physical pain I feel. I feel a kind of moral pain, that “I should’ve been practicing all this time.”

But when I do practice regularly, not only do I learn new songs quickly and enjoy the music more, I also find it just plain physically easier to play. My fingers don’t hurt at all – not till I’ve been playing solidly for a couple hours or more. My fingers have calluses to protect them, and they’ve grown stronger through exercise.

Building up habits of virtue

Now, for the past couple weeks I’ve been distracted, pulled in several different directions. I haven’t always been able to get to bed on time, or to eat at normal meal times, and so on. Sometimes I’ve used the difficulty of the day as an excuse to break my habits, to stay up late or to sleep in, to drop my daily prayer and meditation, to skip walking or exercising, to let the dishes pile up, and so on.

So right now, I feel like my soul has lost its calluses, and lost its strength. It’s hard, even a little painful, to do simple things like add appointments to my calendar or fold my clothes as soon as I take them out of the dryer. I know I should, and I know how much easier it makes life; but I’ve let myself go soft, and that means I have to deal with some extra difficulty here and now.

Virtue makes life easier exactly by embracing the difficulty of life. That is to say, developing good habits allows me to do only the actual toil, and suffer only the necessary pain, of the work itself – instead of having to toil at learning how to do the work, and enduring the pain of building strength and resistance, every single time I try to do something.

There’s no avoiding the difficulty and suffering of life; but the habits of virtue build up the ability to keep going, even to do better and better things, with as little difficulty and pain as possible.

The primary virtue of prudence

I find in my own life I keep returning to two virtues: charity and prudence. Charity is called the “form” of the virtues, because it directs us toward what is good; that is, it is the habit of focusing on the goal of virtue. Prudence is called the “first” of the virtues, or the primary virtue, because it shows the means to achieve the good; that is, it is the habit of making responsible decisions.

These two virtues, especially prudence, are the hardest for me to develop. They’re also the most rewarding. They provide the strength and the toughness needed for the other virtues to form and to flourish.

My temptation to neglect prudence usually takes the form: “I’ve done so much already, I deserve a break.” It’s the illusion that there are times or situations in which I don’t have to make a good decision. It’s an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for my own actions.

So, when I find I’ve let myself go soft, as I have over the past couple weeks, I realize the only solution is to start practicing again. Scheduled routine, to-do lists, and journaling are some of the tools I use for practicing prudence. At first, it’s hard, and I keep wondering why I have to do this dull and artificial-feeling work. Don’t I already know what I think, and what I have to do?

But it’s the difference between knowing where to put my fingers and actually playing music.

Just keep walking, just keep walking...

I get overwhelmed pretty easily. Sometimes, just looking at the pile of dishes in my sink exhausts me. Other times I’m more ambitious: I figure I can conquer the world but I worry if I’ll make it outside the little pond of our solar system. But the fact is, whenever I face a new task – or a new start on an ongoing task – there’s a part of me that asks, “Can I really do that?”

For example, I’ve mentioned that I’m working on a book about my grandmother’s life. Until the last couple weeks, I’ve been stuck on the magnitude of the project. I talked to one of my uncles about my problems, and he suggested a couple ways to break the project down into smaller pieces, each of which is do-able in an hour or two.

Well, duh! says I. I know how to do that. I just don’t want to.

Why not? Because there’s another part of me, call it the grandiose egotist side, that doesn’t want to do anything that isn’t instantly apparent as brilliant and perfect. Plugging along at little tasks just doesn’t have the same feel as finishing a book, or even a chapter.

Reality check

It’s at this point that I need to pull myself back down to earth. Both my despair of finishing a job and my desire for the feeling of accomplishment are unwarranted. What is true is that every task has some pleasant and some unpleasant aspects to it. That’s just the nature of reality, and it does no good to focus only on the difficult aspects while ignoring the easy or exciting aspects – or vice versa.

Rather, I need to focus on what is directly in front of me: what is here and now. So, for my grandma’s book, I have some research to do and some notes to take today. If I spend my time worrying about how many interviews I still need to conduct, or on the other hand daydreaming about how high it will reach on the New York Times bestseller list, then I will create my own failure.

If instead I do a couple hours of work, and spend five minutes at the end reviewing what I’ve done, then I will see the progress I have made. It may be small progress, but it shows me where I am in the big picture of the job. Moreover, it allows me to know exactly where to pick up again tomorrow.

Life application

Now, the example of working on my grandmother’s book is an application of the virtue of prudence, with a little temperance thrown in for good measure. And even though it’s a book – a book! – it’s still a fairly small and focused task.

The life of virtue is a call to apply virtue to every aspect of my life. I need to be prudent, not just about writing a memoir, but also about cleaning my kitchen and relating to my friends and voting in the election and my attitude toward strangers and…. I need to do this for the next 50 years or however long I happen to hang out on this earth. Zoiks! I really can’t deal with a task that big!

And yet, a life is composed of days, and a day is composed of hours. Every moment is an opportunity to practice some small virtue. Every day is a chance to live life fully – meaning to fully live, though not to live an entire life.

I used to write up a daily inventory on this blog. I stopped that because I was self-censoring, leaving out the parts of my life I didn’t particularly want to publicize. So now I’m keeping the inventory in a journal. This is an old practice. The Jesuits have a form of it called the Examen. Twelve-step programs call it the Tenth Step. The reason behind keeping an inventory is to learn to recognize what is really going on in any given day. It is like reviewing my work at the end of a task: it gives a reality check and shows me where I am in the bigger picture.

Slowly but surely, I’m beginning to see my life – my desires, my relationships, my work – more clearly. Slowly but surely, I’m making progress in virtue, and part of that progress is recognizing my small steps forward as genuine progress.

Classical virtue - very classy

I was talking with a friend this weekend, and she said that she was a little confused when she first visited my blog because it wasn’t clear what kind of virtue I was talking about. So I took another look at the page, and I realize that the words “classical” and “cardinal” are entirely missing from the page.

I’ll rectify that soon, but in the meantime I realized that it never hurts to take another look at the big picture.

The classical virtues

The main reason I’m writing this blog is as a kind of public self-improvement exercise. I’ve found that the classical philosophy of virtue describes my strengths, my faults, and my potential. It also gives a very practical structure to work on overcoming my weaknesses and to work toward my potential.

These virtues are traditionally grouped under the four “cardinal” virtues and the three “theological” virtues:

• Cardinal virtues
  • Prudence, AKA Wisdom
  • Justice
  • Fortitude, AKA Courage
  • Temperance, AKA Self-control
• Theological virtues
  • Faith
  • Hope
  • Charity, AKA Love

Each of these virtues describes a different way to achieve a certain excellence or fulfillment of human life. They are ways to become more human, and more humane.

Habits of life

A virtue is a habit of life, that is, it is an inclination to live and act easily and effectively. It’s not a “natural” inclination, in that no one is born with it. We acquire the virtues, mainly by practicing the kinds of actions associated with them. For example, I develop an inclination to courage by taking standing fast in the face of danger and difficulty, even when I am terrified; as I grow in courage, I find that facing danger is easier and less intimidating – if not actually less frightening. I grow in both confidence and ability.

On the other hand, a virtue is exactly a “natural” habit because it is fulfills my nature as a human person. It is part of human nature to grow, to develop, to learn, to interact with other people, and so on. Virtues are the habits of living a fully human life: wisely, justly, lovingly. Practicing virtue helps me to become more myself.

It is something like the habit of playing a musical instrument: at first, the actions don’t feel natural; but with practice, they become a kind of “second-nature”. Playing music becomes easy and enjoyable. Virtues are habits that apply, not just to a single activity like music, but to every aspect of life.

Vice

A vice is essentially a bad habit: it is an inclination to act less than human, or even contrary to human nature. We all have them. My own main vice (as far as I can tell) is sloth: I’m lazy, and I also tend to be skeptical about whether something is worth doing. It takes a lot to get me moving. This means that I spend a lot of time and energy complaining or looking for escapist entertainment rather than actually facing reality or doing something positive.

Generally speaking, every virtue has at least two vices: too much and too little. Taking courage as an example again, it’s possible to be too timid, or to be to rash. Courage is bold, but not brash; it’s cautious, but doesn’t hesitate.

Overcoming vice and growing in virtue go hand in hand.

That whole “theological” thing

The “cardinal” virtues were taken for granted by the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and it’s possible to find similar ideas in most ancient cultures. In the middle ages, Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas added three “theological” virtues mentioned in the Bible. These virtues are acquired, not only by practice, but by a gift from God.

I include them in this blog, not because I want to push a Christian agenda, but because I think there is a natural aspect to these virtues that fills out the cardinal virtues. Love resolves the conflict between justice and mercy, hope gives purpose to courage and temperane, faith extends rational prudence into deep relationships.

That said, I’m a practicing Catholic myself, and many of the people I read approach these virtues from a Christian point of view. It would be silly to try to hide that. My goal, though, is to propose rather than to impose, to share the wisdom I’m learning without expecting it to be the final word.

Not actually all that logical

My good friend Amy said:

The problem here is that you can’t teach people how to think. Not, at least, without heading straight long into [indoctrination] schools (Communist, Nazi, etc). Not a soul on the planet will tell you they don’t know how to think, even if their life is a long string of screw ups. And who gets to judge whose thinking is “right”? (After all everyone must think to act, even if poorly.) Other than practical matters of social order and universal natural law, I think humans might be best to leave that judgment to God.

There’s a lot going on it that. I replied that you can teach people how to be critical or rigorous in their thought, and she replied:

Of course you can teach someone the rules of logic. Notice however, they are your (or someone elses) rules of logic. … You can ask others questions, but by definition these must come from your cultural background. And the act of questioning to find “weaknesses in thought” creates a framework that suggests that you may have a superior line of thinking from the get go. … All people think spontaneously and creatively on their own. It maybe that their illogical or weak thinking is simply something that you don’t understand or agree with. Very dangerous stuff, this “logical” thinking.

Dangerous stuff!

I fully agree that thinking is dangerous stuff. It’s far too dangerous to leave children in ignorance about it.

As Amy says, we think spontaneously and creatively. We can’t help but think. We are, by nature, rational animals; Homo sapiens literally means “wise man”; thinking is what defines our species. But thinking is an ability like all our other natural abilities: walking, for example, or eating, or communicating. But all of these require, not just natural ability, but a certain learning as well. We assist children in learning how to walk, we encourage and correct them. If someone shows great ability, we train them into athletes. We refine and strengthen our natural ability through instruction and training.

Likewise, we introduce different foods to children, and teach them what is food and what is not, and continue to refine our tastes into adulthood. And, while the instinct and need to communicate is innate, it is only through learning the “artificial” structures of language that we are able to actually make ourselves known to others, or to know them ourselves.

Thinking is the same way: the rules of logic are like the rules of walking or the rules of digestion. They are discovered rather than made up. Logic is the science that shows how thought works, and is able to analyze whether a conclusion really does follow from a premise. People don’t have to know the rules of logic in order to think, but they will think more easily and avoid more pitfalls if they know where the pitfalls and obstacles are.

Beyond logic … there be dragons!

There are lots of ways of thinking that don’t fit neatly into the forms of a syllogism or the structures that logic uses to describe thought. There are lots of sentences that don’t fit neatly into a grammatical diagram, and grammatical diagrams are far from the easiest way to communicate; yet grammar is a tool to help us understand speech; and logic is a tool to help us understand thought.

Logic helps us test and understand whether the questions we ask are limited to our cultural background, or whether they speak to something universally human. Logic helps us discover whether a line of thinking has problems or contradictions, that is, weaknesses. Logic, far from being “your” rules or “someone’s” rules, are our rules. They are ways of bridging the gaps that appear when we disagree or don’t understand someone else.

When we let go of logic, then there is nothing to bridge the gaps. All we have left is, “Well, I disagree,” and there’s no possibility of further communication. That person who says something I don’t understand may be a friend or an enemy, but I have no way of knowing. We may agree or disagree, but I have a hard time figuring that out unless we can examine our thoughts and find out where they are similar, where they are different, and where either of us may be making mistakes. The person I’m arguing with may be a dragon or may be a knight in shining armor, but without logic, I have no way of finding the truth.

The truth will make you free

And this, I think reaches the foundation of Amy’s assertion. She says:

George Lucas got it dead on with the line “The Truth very much depends on your point of view”

Taken to its extreme, (which is what we have in today’s realm of “identity politics” and “advocacy journalism” and so on,) this is an utter denial of the existence of truth or of our ability to think about it.

Our perception of the truth depends on our point of view. The truth itself, reality itself, does not. We can be wrong about the truth. This is why we need tools like logic (and grammar, and physics, and economics, and so on) to keep us honest, to keep us grounded in reality. My point of view is limited, and fallible. My culture’s point of view is biased and historically conditioned. But points of view can be tested, and taught to connect to reality. Reality, truth, is the only real basis we have for speaking and working with each other.

To everything... (turn, turn, turn)

I have two main goals for this blog: First, to share practical, down-to-earth tips on growing in virtue that I glean from my own experience and what I’m learning from others; Second, to transform the world into a perfectly virtuous society.

Okay, so maybe the second goal is a little ambitious. I guess I’ll focus on the first.

I find I often get stuck, whether in a project or in a relationship or just in life, because I don’t feel like I’ve made enough progress. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels, like I’m never going to get to the destination. I wonder whether it’s worth all the effort I’ve put into it – or worth any effort at all.

It helps me to see where I actually stand in the big picture. For example, I’m working on a book, and I’m still mainly in the research phase. It’s frustrating that I don’t have many pages written, but I have to remind myself that I really shouldn’t have many pages written at this point in the project. What I should have – and do have – are lots of notes and a to-read list that I’m slowly working through.

The big picture of a virtuous life

Living a life of virtue is a much bigger project than writing a book, and the process can seem vague or unclear. The goals are abstract: happiness, ease, skill. The advice is general: practice, discern, persist. This is because virtue is a habit that applies to every action and decision a person takes, pretty much from birth to death; so it’s hard to get too specific.

That said, I do think there are three broad stages of growth in virtue, and seeing where I am in those stages helps me keep working.

The stages are:

1. Discipline
2. Experimentation
3. Mastery

Discipline

This is the beginning stage of virtue. In languages, it usually looks like memorization. In basketball, it looks like drills and free throws. In carpentry, it looks like apprenticeship.

Essentially, it is the recognition that I haven’t got what I need to do what I want to do. So I build up the skills by repetition and exercise. I “practice” the virtue. I do the sorts of things that a skilled or virtuous person does; but I recognize that it will be difficult and take concentration for me, while it is easy and second-nature for them.

I also recognize that I’ll make lots of mistakes. Mistakes are normal at this stage. Mistakes are not failures; rather, they are lessons.

Experimentation

As I gain the strength or skill in the foundational actions, I begin to make them my own. I try them out in different areas of my life. I try constructing my own sentences in the new language, or a complex shot in basketball, or building a custom cabinet.

This is where the growth is most obvious, and it can be very exciting. It’s also where failure hurts the most, because I invest each experiment with personal energy, and the stakes feel quite high.

The real lesson of this stage is evaluation, or discernment. The success or failure of a given attempt doesn’t matter nearly so much as the learning I can gain from it. Why did I succeed at this? What caused that to fail?

Mastery

In a way, this is the goal: making decisions and taking actions has become easy and I can do it without some arduous process. But growth hasn’t stopped. It hasn’t even plateaued. Rather, it has deepened.

A master is still experimenting; but at a deeper level than a less experienced person. Now, the only language I am a master of is English: but that doesn’t mean I never make mistakes, nor have I stopped trying out new turns of phrase and discerning whether they work or not. At the same time, I correct my mistakes before most other people notice them, and even my failed experiments usually succeed at some level or other.

More than this, though, a master is able to teach others. I’m able to spot, not only my own mistakes, but other people’s misspellings and grammar errors and weak expressions. I’m able to show them how to improve, to grow in their ability to speak and write English.

The temptation

The truth is, the English language is probably the only area of my life I can claim mastery of; and even then, I’m far from the greatest poet or speaker in the world. I’m always learning something new myself.

And my mastery of English doesn’t automatically make me a good writer – poetry and fiction and essay all require more than mere language. And none of that spills over into my ability to manage my time well, or be a good friend, or decide how to deal with an unjust situation.

My temptation is to rush ahead, to expect the results of a master, or even of an experimenter, when I really need to keep working on the basic discipline. I see my mistakes as failures, and I want to just abandon the whole project.

I need to remind myself that I’m right where I belong in the process as long as I don’t give up, as long as I keep moving forward.

In principium, Deus creavit...

Actually, I’m serious. By “order,” I mean specifically teleological order. In non-techno-babble, that means, whether things are in and of themselves directed to an end beyond themselves. The classic example is the eye: the eye is ordered toward the sense of sight, and so an eye that does not see is a “bad” eye.

Order and morality

Now, someone might object that you can’t blame the eye for being blind. And that’s true. So it’s important to distinguish between what’s called “ontological evil” and “moral evil.” “Ontological evil,” or evil in “being,” is simply the lack of full existence or perfection in a thing. A diseased tree, or a collapsed bridge, or a blind eye is “bad” because it lacks the fullness of what it is to BE a tree, or a bridge, or an eye.

“Moral evil,” on the other hand, involves the freedom of the will. Without personal freedom, there can be no “bad” or “evil” except in the ontological sense. For something to be evil in a moral sense, it must be a bad choice

Now, according to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and those who follow their tradition, the mind has several major parts, two of which are the intellect and the will. The purpose of the intellect is to understand things abstractly. The purpose of the will is to choose freely. If the intellect has a problem – for example, my intellect has great difficulty grasping poetry and metaphor, but thrives on mathematics – then we recognize that as a problem in the mind. I tell people that I’m “bad” with poetry, and they know what I mean.

If the will has a problem, it affects a person’s ability to choose freely. Sometimes this is a mental illness; for example, a psychopath is not free to act empathetically, or even responsibly. But often, we limit our own freedom by our very choices themselves. If I choose to insult you, I am no longer free to be your friend.

The slavery of vice

Now, part of the nature of the will is to develop habits. Habits are to the will what memory is to the intellect: they keep us from having to re-invent the wheel every time we hit the road. So, a virtuous habit is one that protects, or even extends the freedom of the will. Vice, on the other hand, increasingly limits the will’s freedom.

But this freedom is not freedom to do anything at any time; it is freedom to fulfill the nature of the person. It is freedom to pursue the good.

The best image I’ve found is that of a piano keyboard. Anyone at any time is free to hit any key or combination of keys on the keyboard. (This is what Pinckaers calls “freedom of indifference.”) But only someone who has practiced a great deal is free to play Debussy, or to compose an original work of music.

Now, every moment of every day, our will faces at least 88 possible choices of what to do next. If we practice making those choices well, with an idea of harmony or rhythm or beauty in mind, then we will develop habits that allow us to make more interesting and more complex and more, well, good choices. The will really does become more free, more fulfilled in achieving its purpose.

But if we simply hammer away at life according to mood or blind emotion, like a piano student who refuses to adopt proper posture or fingering, then we limit our freedom and risk hurting both ourselves and the instrument – that is, everybody around us.

Natural morality

This view of the human person, one who has a purpose or an end in both being and acting, and whose purpose is to pursue greater and greater goods, is the foundation of any theory of natural rights, or natural law, or natural morality of any kind.

Some thinkers have tried to do away with “human nature” without losing universal morality, but I haven’t found any of them (that I’ve read) to be convincing.

Others have noted that it’s incredibly difficult to pin down exactly what’s involved in “human nature” and have accepted that rejecting nature also means rejecting any universal morality. But then why do even they act as if moral questions remained vital? Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment is a brilliant exploration of the problems with this way of thinking.

So that’s largely why I’m convinced that there really is such a thing as human nature, and that the nature of the will is to choose freely, and that virtue is the true path to freedom and fulfillment and happiness.

But I’ve been talking too much. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

The view from the top makes it look so easy!

More goodness from Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics!

Following St. Thomas Aquinas, Pinckaers gives three basic stages of growth in virtue:

1. Beginner / childhood
2. Proficient / adolescent
3. Perfect / mature adult

Each of these stages essentially follows the growth in freedom of a person, and challenges the person to become more free in his or her life. Here’s how each stage works:

Beginning in virtue

The beginner needs to learn how the world works. This is the stage of getting to know – to know oneself, to know one’s abilities, and to know the world and the moral basis of one’s life in the world. The primary work of this stage is learning or, to use a more traditional word, discipline.

Now, it strikes us that discipline is something opposed to freedom, but when the freedom we seek is to live a fully human life, we start out in need of knowledge and in need of practice. Human beings need to be raised and trained and taught.

The goal of education is to lead the child to understand (and the educator must first understand this himself) that discipline, law, and rules are not meant to destroy his freedom, still less to crush or enslave him. Their purpose is rather to develop his ability to perform actions of real excellence by removing dangerous excesses, which can proliferate in the human person like weeds stifling good grain, and by guarding him against unhealthy errors that could turn him aside and jeopardize his interior freedom.

Moreover, this is only the initial stage of growth, just as practicing scales is the beginning and not the end of playing the piano.

Progress in virtue

The second stage involves internalizing the rules by seeing and acting on the reason the rules exist in the first place. It involves a certain testing of the rules – not to destroy them, but to understand them, just as a pianist might try out different formations of a chord or ask what happens when you add this note to it. This is the stage where virtues become, not actions that one follows because they’re imposed, but a kind of “second nature,” an ability that really is one’s own.

Virtue is not a habitual way of acting, formed by the repetition of material acts and engendering in us a psychological mechanism. It is a personal capacity for action, the fruit of a series of fine cations, a power for progress and perfection.

In other words, freedom and goodness cease to be mechanical exercises and become organic parts of us.

Perfect virtue

First off, Pinckaers warns (and I warn with him) that “perfect” here doesn’t mean the end of the road; rather, it means the fulfillment, and the completion of development. Probably a better word for today would be “mature” but St. Thomas used “perfect” so Pinckaers explains what he meant by it.

We can characterize this stage by two features: mastery of excellent actions and creative fruitfulness.

This is the ultimate goal: to be able to do whatever we do well, and to do it creatively. This is what Thomas Edison meant by saying that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The virtuous person has gained the freedom and the ability to bring inspiration to reality in spite of the difficulty or obstacles in the way.

This does not mean the end of learning or of growth; rather it means that learning and growth continue almost naturally, without great effort – because the virtuous person has learned how to learn, and has rooted him- or herself in good soil for growth. Virtue has become a stable foundation for the freedom to do what really leads to happiness.

And that’s a goal worth striving for!

A many-splendored thing

I suppose Valentine’s day is as good a time as any to talk about lust.

The other day, I was working with a client who happened to be a good-looking woman about my age, and I found myself tripping over my words trying to be witty, trying to impress her, wondering how I could shift the conversation away from professional topics and toward more … intimate sharing.

I also made a greater-than-average number of typos. And I completely forgot about the main question she’d come to resolve. So I had to scramble to correct a fairly major error. And she walked away, doubtless thinking me a fool.

Such are the wages of lust.

The difference between love and lust

The thing about my actions and reactions is that they really had nothing to do with her. They had to do with my response to her physical appearance. That’s the core of lust: it clings to the surface and cannot survive at any depth at all. This is because lust is all about pleasing the senses – both the physical senses, like sight and touch, and the psychological senses, like self-esteem and emotions.

Love, on the other hand, considers the other person first and foremost as a person. It doesn’t disregard the surface or the appearance, but it seeks the fulness of life that animates that surface, that expresses that appearance. Love also recognizes that the other person is looking back, is seeing the appearance that I show. So love reflects the beauty and goodness it sees back to the beloved. Love treats the other person as someone to be served, not as an object that serves my desires.

Love as a virtue

Love has many levels and kinds and degrees. I love my friends. I love my mother. I love my neighbor. If I had a sweetheart, I would love her. These all are different kinds of love, and some loves are “greater” or “stronger” than others.

But what they all have in common is that they seek what is good in the one I love. When love finds something good in someone, it rejoices. When it finds a lack of good, it tries to help or remedy that lack. But love always focuses on the good of the other.

And that takes practice: sometimes, the good in another is not all that obvious. My brother and I are so different, that I spent several years just trying to avoid him, because I couldn’t see anything good in him. For that matter, a spouse’s annoying habit, or a friend’s inconvenient imposition, or even just one’s own bad mood can blind us to what is good in those we love.

At times like that, I’ve found the best thing to do is stop, look at the person, and look specifically for any little thing to appreciate. It will always be there, if you’re willing to search for it.

Now, if only they were topped with bacon....

One of my friends is a young priest at my parish, Fr. Raphael Mary. He preached the homily this morning on the Beatitudes – Luke’s version, with the “woes” as well as the “blesseds”.

He started with Krispy Kreme donuts. (No, I won’t link to their site!) He described an occasion on which he thought such a donut too good to pass up. Repeatedly. At least seven times. And as he lay on a sofa with a stomach-ache, seven donuts congealing into a blob of greasy sugar in his belly, a friend asked him, “Why did you do that?”

Temporary and permanet goods

Fr. Raphael Mary’s answer was, basically, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” In other words, he chased after the immediate pleasure rather than the long-term good.

He then used TV as another example. While you’re actively watching a show, he said, it gives you pleasure. But when the show is over, that pleasure doesn’t last. In fact, it leaves you feeling rather empty.

Now, this is where I have to disagree with my friend.

No, I don’t disagree that television is all-too-often a superficial pleasure – if it’s a pleasure at all. Actually, I disagree that it’s something that disappears as soon as it’s over, or as soon as one leaves it behind.

Those images, those thoughts, those repetative themes from the soundtrack all stay with me long after the show is gone. They sit in my mind like the remnants of those donuts sat in Fr. Raphael Mary’s gut.

And, to some extent or other, so does everything else. At a bare minimum, the time spent on an activity – whether skiing or feeding the poor or napping in front of a “Gilmore Girls” marathon – has fixed itself permanently in one’s past. It has become part of one’s history, and no one can undo what has been done.

There may be other effects that last beyond the event as well: one can never not cheat on that one test, or take back those words to one’s mother, or not eat those seven donuts. We can’t change the past, and we have to deal with the ramifications of the past in the present and the future.

Real and apparent goods

Our actions and choices don’t just change the world around us; they change our very selves. They form habits. I become accustomed to eating lots of donuts, or to watching telly for three straight hours, or to lying to my friends, or to ….

This is why the real question is not, How long will the pleasure last? The question is, Is this pleasure really good?

Maybe more accurately, the question is, What kind of good is this thing that I desire? Is it an important good? Is it something that will help me be more myself? Or is it only good for a part of me – my tongue, or my eyes, or my self-image? Is it good for a part, but bad for the whole of me?

These are the questions that lead to virtue.

Time to get up

I’d been having a pretty good month, till about the middle of this past week. I’ve been waking up on time, getting work done, keeping in touch with friends, praying regularly, and so on … but little things slowly began to slip. So, I haven’t really made my bed since Wednesday. I came in late to work a couple days this week – only a couple minutes late, but definitely late. And these past couple days off, I’ve spent more time watching telly and playing computer games than reading or writing, which is what I had planned to do.

The demon despair

Now, my tendency when I find myself slipping into bad habits is just to give up the fight.

That’s because I’m (first) lazy and (second) a coward and (third) prone to depression. Big whoop. I know plenty of people who can identify with those vices, and I know I’m not alone. But that doesn’t make it okay.

So, the question is, what to do about it. How can I overcome the temptation to despair?

I think the first step is to recognize that this isn’t just a minor foible. This is self-destructive behavior in a very literal sense. Despair is just a non-committal form of suicide, and I need to recognize it as a real and present attack on my life and happiness.

Doesn’t matter that the attack comes from within. I need to recognize it as a threat, or else I won’t meet it with the right attitude.

The monk’s solution

I heard a story once about a guy who walked past a monastery every day, always longing to be like the monks inside but thinking he wasn’t holy enough. One day, he met a monk who was sweeping the sidewalk. He asked the monk what he did in the monastery.

The monk said, “We fall down, then get back up. We fall down, then get back up.”

I always thought of that as a smarmy way of saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But I’m starting to take it a little more literally: think of a boxing match. If you get knocked down, you stand back up. You struggle to your feet by whatever means necessary. If you don’t the fight is over. You’ve lost.

I’ve read enough works by mystics to know that “spiritual warfare” is not just a metaphor for them. I think it can’t just be a metaphor for me, either.

A declaration of war

Therefore I’m declaring war on my vices. I may not win, but my plan is, like Galadriel, to “fight the long defeat.” Or like Rocky, to “go the distance.”

After all, virtue is not about perfection. It is about excellence. It is about settling for nothing less than one’s best.