Week 1 Recap
This week, I tried to be a more loving person. Here's how it went...
In last week’s newsletter, I shared my plan for the year:
“[W]hat I’ve done several times over the years is pick a list of virtues or traits that I want to develop — like love, patience, wisdom, discipline, kindness, generosity, etc. — and work on them every single day and try to develop them like habits…I decided over Christmas break that I need to do this again in 2022. I had hoped to start first thing in January, but that didn’t work, so I’m going to start it up on February 1st and pick one or two virtues a month to focus on and add them to the checklist. I want to read and think about each new virtue or trait as I go, and will be reading various things from philosophers so that I can better understand each one.”
I decided to begin with love. I think love is probably the most difficult virtue (if it is indeed even a virtue!) to understand and the most difficult to actually develop as a habit, and that’s why I chose to start off with it — I’ll get eleven months to work on it and try to understand it. So, this past week, I looked for small opportunities to be a more loving person.
There are two things to note in that last sentence: “small opportunities” and “a more loving person.”
First: Starting small is key. I’m trying to develop virtues as habits, not set myself up for failure. I’ll give you a quick example: I’m often really cruel to myself, and don’t think or say the nicest things about myself to myself. Like, I catch myself saying things to myself that I would never, ever, in a million years think about anyone else or say to anyone else. (Why do we do this to ourselves?? I wish I knew!) And so one of the ways I’m trying to become a more loving person is to treat myself with more love. So, on Thursday, instead of criticizing the way I looked or criticizing something else about myself, I made an effort to be kind to the woman staring back at me in the mirror.
Second: The first question that pops into my head when I ask myself how I can be a more loving person is what the hell that even means. What is love? Is it even a virtue? What does it mean to be a loving person? What does it mean to love those around me, to love myself? These questions are exactly the questions that I’m going to try to answer for myself over the next month and through the rest of the year. However, I’ve found that it’s really important not to postpone being more loving just because I don’t have the be-all-end-all understand of what that actually means. Because, ultimately, I do have some idea of what it means, and that basic idea is enough for me to get started. (And you probably have some idea of what that means, at least in your life, and it’s probably enough for you to get started, too!)
Week #1 was simple enough, but now I’m going to make it a little more difficult for myself both by digging a little bit deeper into virtue ethics. Here are a few things I’ll be reading for next week, if you’d like to join me:
The section on Aristotle in Michael Schur’s How to Be Perfect
The first section of Virtue Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction
(Btw, if you want to follow along but don't have time to do all the readings, don't worry -- I'll recap them here!)
I recently read a novel called The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. I found a lot of wisdome in it. Like you, Susan, I try to be more loving and I found a statement in the book that helped me: "You don't have to feel love. Only try to act with love." This helps me deal with people that I don't love. I think we all have some of those people in our lives.