July 16
No longer talk about what a good person ought to be like — but be one.
Meditations X.16
Listening mode
No longer talk about what a good person ought to be like — but be one.
Decency is surprisingly easy to talk about. A whole evening can pass with all of you discussing what people owe one another, when honesty wounds and where consideration shades into cowardice. The conversation was intelligent, and you go home feeling you have already done something.
The occasions when it would actually matter look different. They don't announce themselves as questions but as interruptions: a call that comes at a bad time, someone who wants the same thing explained for the third time, a request that costs you an hour. In that moment you aren't thinking about principles but about your schedule.
Perhaps that is where the real difficulty lies. The concepts so readily at your disposal in conversation hardly fit such moments. They are made for clearer cases, for decisions with weight. What actually asks something of you seems, by comparison, too small to be a test.
And when you give up the hour, it seldom feels like kindness. More like an afternoon in which you didn't get something else finished.
