Five Most Important Things in Life

When we were travelling this summer, my son asked me an interesting question. "What are the five most important things in life?" he said. I was floored momentarily. We have not had many serious conversations since he turned 14! But I tried to answer as we buzzed along I-85 in North Carolina.

First, I said, is Love. Not romance, or cuddly-love, but the kind of love that lasts. The love that cleans up vomit in the middle of the night, and changes diapers, and provides a shoulder to cry on even when we're busy. The love that endures slights, and bad days, and the friction of living with people for years. The love that celebrates others' successes, and wishes the world well, and sacrifices in the name of all that is good and great.

Next, I said, is Loyalty. Loyalty is akin to love, but not the same thing. It is the essence of friendship and partnership and family and community. Loyalty is the will to stand by someone even when that person is in trouble, or being disagreeable, or suffering. Loyalty is believing enough in someone or something to act on their/its behalf without regard for one's own comfort. Loyalty is stick-to-it-ness, and it nurtures relationships and principles and values.

After that, I thought, would come Virtue. Virtue is the will to do good in every situation. What can I do that will make this situation even better? How can I act in a positive way? What would be the loving and kind and caring thing to do? Virtue improves the person who exercises it, and improves the world around those people.

Then, I said, we need Pleasure. Pleasure is the spring of all human action. I suppose that I could use the word Joy here, but I don't want to leave the body out of the discussion. Physical pleasures are important too. We need to touch and to be touched. We need to eat and drink, and to enjoy sustaining the life that beats within us. We need to feel the sensations of the world around us. These pleasures are vital. But we also need to find pleasure in good ideas, in good work, in doing good. Pleasure gives us hope, and makes belief possible. Pleasure engages our attention, and makes great work possible. When we learn to take pleasure in virtue, and loyalty, and lasting love, we harness the greatest force of our life in the service of all that's good.

And finally, to be able to enjoy the benefits of the first four things, and to cultivate them, we need Patience. Life doesn't give us what we want when we want it. Life doesn't make things easy, or quick, or painless. Relationships are slow work. Teaching and learning are slow work. Building a community, or a house, or a new way of life, is slow work. Patience is walking one step at a time, keeping attention on the work at hand. Patience is stopping work long enough to relax and renew one's will to go on. Patience is not straining to finish, but finding satisfaction in each little success along the way. Patience is letting time do its work rather than trying to outrace time itself.

So those were the five things, I thought. Five most important things. Five of many, of course.

Fact, Fiction, and Lived Experience

As I'm reading Morris Berman's Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West, I am continually struck by moments of keen insight and wisdom. A good book is that way, isn't it? Chords are sounded, and notes are rung true on the scale of human experience.

Berman makes the point that what we consider objectivity, and "hard" science, and fact, are really only the remains of a process that began as movement and interaction and gradual realization. The shells and tools and implements of war that remain behind long ages after living creatures inhabited the earth are not the essence of what those creatures were. They were thinking, singing, making love, arguing, imagining, looking, sensing, wishing, yearning . . . They were more than tool-makers and war-makers. Yet we have no lasting evidence of the "soft" side of their experience. Only cave paintings and works of art and literature. And those don't last long enough to help us enter the world of the primeval man that we wish to know better.

The process of making, and the experience of living, are lost in the flow of time. All that remains are the products of the work. Like Shelley's Ozymandias, whose statue proclaims its omnipotence even as the king himself has disappeared into the sands of the desert. The king's lived experience has vanished. The sculptor's has nearly vanished as well. All we have is the sculptor's interpretation of the king and our interpretation of the stone that remains.

For me, fiction and poetry are important because they (can) capture(s) lived experience in all its richness and complexity. They do not (at their best) reduce life to facts and products. Instead, they encourage us to attend to processes, moments, and meanings as they emerge from lived experience. They provide us with an extension of our own lived experience--a broader world that we can enter with complete engagement, not as scientists uncovering fossils but as new inhabitants of a living fictional world. Lived experience, and the sharing of lived experience, and the broader understanding of lived experience, are what liberal arts education should be all about.