W
hat does the good life look for for a man? There are a couple of competing visions in my head. Well, I suppose I should say competing secular visions. By the end of this, I'll be coming back around the way that the spiritual life interacts with these visions.
One is the life of toil and excellence. In this vision, a man's job is to work hard and work well, supporting his family, advancing his chosen profession, gaining the respect of his peers and community, and generally fulfilling the Aristotelian ideal of the magnanimous man. For this kind of man, small pleasures remain small -- he is single-minded in his focus, and occasionally takes his breaks and vacations in order to get back to being what he is: a worker and shaper of the world around him.
The other vision sees the first as a sort of pathology. In this vision, leisure is of much higher import than work. In this vision, humans are meant to follow their interests and steadily craft their lives around them as curious generalists. Where the magnanimous man is focused outward, towards his society, the anarchist man, we could call him, is focused inward, on his home, on his family, on his neighbors, on his spiritual life. He may do marvelous things, but this will be a matter of paying keen attention to his interests, and letting himself be guided on a day to day basis by the rhythms of the world, rather than trying to bring the world in line with himself.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am more naturally the second kind of man. They may also know that I sometimes yearn to be more like the first. The magnanimous man is impressive, his accomplishments are formidable, and his words have the power to alter lives. I think of Hayao Miyazaki and Jiro Ono, of Stanley Kubrick and Abraham Lincoln. These are men whose good work consumed their lives, but made them strong and elevated them. A desire to emulate them is natural.
It should be said -- I'm thirty-three years old, and unlikely to find the wherewithal to radically alter my personality at this point. I will be changed by being a father and a husband over a long period of time, but the aforementioned men were all deep into their careers and crafts, and had formed the habits that would define them, by the time they were my age. However, small things could conceivably be accomplished with effort, and I ask myself what that effort would look like, where it would go, and whether it would be worth it.
Obviously, I have responsibilities that need fulfilling -- the anarchic man is not a bum, but he tends to not make a great amount of money. In my case, by a lot of folks' perceptions, I work near incessantly; virtually all of my hobbies involve effort, study, learning, technique. However, making money, dedicating myself to a singular pursuit, pursuing societal honors -- as such, these things hold very little interest for me. I do, however, have a minor dread of the terrible phrase "wasted potential".
But really, I suspect all this discussion is somewhat irrelevant at the end of the day, because the question was poorly phrased from the beginning. We should not be asking ourselves, exactly, "How ought a man to act?", but "How do I give glory to God?" And in asking the question this way, we have to face up to the fact that nothing we do is worthy of the Lord; the magnanimous genius is just as lowly before his throne as the beggar. We are obliged not to bury our talents, but we must always remember that these talents are not for secular use, but for divine use. The hypocrisy of my personal fears is that if I were, say, designing computer chips, no one (but perhaps an extremely discerning mind) would say I were wasting my intelligence; but my work would be just as vain as any hobby I happen to take on in my actual life.
What matters is God, that we never forget him, that we bend all our actions to him. If I missed my vocation at some point to be a great, singularly focused man, I have to say that the sign was pretty well-hidden. I am thirty-three years old, with no college degree and no traditional "career" ahead of me. But I've got plans, regardless; I can play this hand. Lord, protect and keep me, and draw me ever closer to You.