May 5
Virtue makes the one who has it good, and makes his work good. It is the acquired ease of doing what is right — not laboriously, against oneself, but almost with joy.
Summa Theologica (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Virtue makes the one who has it good, and makes his work good. It is the acquired ease of doing what is right — not laboriously, against oneself, but almost with joy.
As long as something good is hard for you, you can feel it. You hold back a sharp reply or give away something you would rather have kept, and you notice exactly what it costs you. The effort works like proof: here you have overcome yourself.
If the same act becomes easy at some point, that proof disappears. You answer calmly because the sharp reply doesn’t even occur to you. From the inside this hardly looks like merit anymore, more like temperament or habit. When the shift happened, you usually don’t know.
There is a strange displacement in this. The effort had told you something about yourself, and it was a flattering story. Ease tells you nothing. In return it gives back the attention that used to go into the struggle with yourself, and that attention now turns to the person across from you.
Perhaps you sometimes miss the story. All the person beside you notices of its absence is that you are listening.
