It’s time for a break, if only a short one, from Trump’s constant assault on truth and decency and the efforts of Republicans across the country to undermine our democracy.
Today my thoughts are on wisdom for living well as expressed by a wise friend who recently made the comment, “I don’t want for myself what everyone else can’t have.”
His words stopped me in my tracks. They had an undeniable ring of truth to them: “I don’t want for myself what everyone else can’t have.”
He wasn’t saying he only wants what everyone else has, or that he wants everyone else to have what he has. Rather, he was saying he does not want for himself anything to which everyone else does not have access.
This personal code, he said, is rooted in his sense of the mystery of connectedness he feels with all humanity and how that feeling of oneness shapes his life.
Perhaps it’s an ideal, but, then, ideals always call us to a higher level of living:
– Love your neighbor as you love yourself
– Do unto others what you want them to do unto you
– Forgive as you are forgiven
– Don’t want for yourself what others cannot have
These ideals invite us into a way of living better, doing better, being better. At their essence, when we take ideals seriously, they guide us into living holistically, into putting our shared humanity into practice.
Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed it this way: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
That’s the key to life, and to life together, isn’t it? Believing that what happens to me happens to you, and what happens to you happens to me, because we are inextricably connected by our common humanity.
George Washington went so far as to say that this connectedness was the key to the endurance of American democracy and the freedom it affords all of us. In his farewell address he spoke to the newly founded nation as the one leader its citizen trusted more than any other and said:
“The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize.”
And then he declared:
“But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth;…it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness.”
We are living at a moment when Washington’s words are doubly true. First, by connecting the “immense value of your national union” with “collective and individual happiness,” and second, by warning us of those who would “weaken [our] minds of the conviction of this truth,” the truth that our survival as a free people depends on understanding we are one.
His warning is as important as the truth of his vision. From Florida to Georgia to Wisconsin to South Dakota to Arkansas to Alabama to Washington, D. C. and so many other places, the assault on the values and institutions that make us one people has become relentless.
That assault notwithstanding, embracing the ethical principle Washington advocated and by which my friend tries to live holds the key to all of us living in a better way. It is, I suggest, the road less travelled Scott Peck wrote about years ago where love nurtures the oneness of humanity and the good of all is served.
Such a simple principle to not want for yourself what everyone else can’t have, but profound in its redemptive power to make the world a better place.
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