For a good life

How to lead a good life? What does a good life look like? It would seem that there are as many views as there are people.

- Manish Nand

How to lead a good life? What does a good life look like? It would seem that there are as many views as there are people. That view is deceptive. Most times I ask a person I know, the reply seems vaguely familiar: I have heard it before. He is replying by simply reproducing a view he has imbibed from another source. Maybe he has read it in a book he values, perhaps a scripture. Surely there is nothing wrong with reading a book and exposing oneself to its ideas. Just as surely there is everything wrong with swallowing and reproducing its ideas without probing them carefully oneself. This remains true even if the ideas come from the most highly regarded source. Even the Revealed Word and the word from a handed-down tablet. No God would entrust us with a capacity for reason and then expect us to suspend it when it comes to the most important things.

I don't expect people to pontificate or offer an elaborate philosophy of living. I want to hear the gist of their experience, what matters most in their life. I will not be a fool and imagine that because a person cannot articulate precisely what he has felt, what he has long sensed in his guts has no value. I respect many of our elders' gut reactions, their modest effort to put into words what they have sensed in their sunset years.