How Are We To Live?

I am writing this on November 6, 2024, a few hours after waking up to the see the results of the Election.  If you are looking for answers, unfortunately I have none to provide you.  Nor I do I have any sort of concrete set of plans.

Instead, as I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep, I came up with three principles that I hope to follow in the days, weeks, and months ahead.  I think this is going to be bad, bad in a way that none of us who have lived our entire lives in the United States have ever experienced.  How bad, in what ways, we can speculate about but not really actually know.  For me, in this kind of uncertainty, what matters is having a set of priorities and clear principles that you can rely on to navigate your way through chaos.  So, here are the ones I plan to be using.  Perhaps it can be useful to you as you process and make sense of what has happened.

1.  What Matters Is Each Other.  I am not  a rich or powerful man by any means, but I live a comfortable life and am well respected in the community.  These are good things.  But they can also be a crutch in all of the ways that (among other sources) the Gospels tells us they can be a crutch--your desire to protect them and conserve them causes you to take actions that jeopardize other values and principles.  

I have no plans to voluntarily give up anything I have--see Principle #3.  But I accept that all of this may go away.  The economy may crash.  My job and even my entire career may evaporate.  I may be politically and socially ostracized.  I don't look forward to it, but I accept it.  

But, more to the point, I am prepared to voluntarily lay it all down for those I love--my wife primarily, then my close and dear friends and family.  As I told my wife, if I have to be a refugee with nothing but the clothes on my back, I will gladly do it so long as I get to hold her hand in the process.  She is more important to me than anything I own, any job, anything I could do, what anyone else thinks of me.  She is what matters.

Some might read this and think it melodramatic or silly.  Perhaps you are right.  But--and here I will credit the Stoics I have been reading recently--if you have clarity and commitment of purpose with regard to the worst possible outcome, then any lesser outcome is also covered.   If you know what you will do in the face of the nightmare, you will also know what to do with the slightly disturbing dream.  

So, I will be holding fast to those I love, to the people that matter to me, before anything else.

2.  Live With Integrity.  If this goes the way I think it will go, there will be a plethora of opportunities to make your life easier and safer by aligning yourself with the direction of the prevailing wind.  Some of this will take the form of overt and full-frontal shilling and manipulation--if you think there is an endless parade of grifters now, I don't think you've seen anything yet.  But there are also subtle and small compromises made available.  And those small compromises have a kind of additive effect--once you take one, it becomes easier to take a second.  You can find yourself in a very uncomfortable place without really knowing how you got there.

So, my second principle is to focus on living with integrity.  I am going to do what I believe to be right and say what I believe to be true, no matter the consequences .  Indeed, we may find ourselves in a place where the very act of writing something like this may be scanned and used against me.  I don't care.  The things I have written in this space accurately reflect where I was and what I believed at the time I wrote them.  They may be incorrect or misguided but they were honest and forthright.  I intend to conduct my affairs in the same spirit.

This also means being accountable to each other.  I am sure at some point I will fall down in this regard.  I am sure that someone close to me will fall down in this regard.  This stuff is hard.  The only way we are going to get through this together is to be honest with each other, not to condemn and criticize but to build each other up.

The only way we truly lose is if we wake up one day and hate the person we have become.  That is the only outcome I am not willing to accept for myself.    

3.  Don't Let Them Preemptively Steal Your Joy.  My wife and I have some exciting things coming down the pike over the next few months.  We are under contract to buy a house.  We are planning to start a family next year by becoming foster and adoptive parents.  We have trips we want to take and things we want to do.  When this comes down, the question comes up as to whether we should forego these things.  It is a good question, worth asking, but I think the answer is no.

My attitude is that it may be the case that some of these opportunities we are excited about may be taken away from us.  But I want to make them take it away from us.  If we just give up on them preemptively, then they have already won.  They have made people like us miserable, they have stolen our joy, and they didn't even have to do anything.  No.  I am going to live my life and celebrate what I can for as long as I can.  There is a defiance in living well, in living unafraid and unbowed.  I intend to manifest that defiance.  

This Principle is very intentionally listed third.  The moment living well means not sticking with those I love or maintaining integrity, then it is gone.  But up to the nanosecond before it clashes with the other principles, I intend to enjoy a house we are thrilled to be moving to and the possibility of expanding our world and our friends and our family and all that life has to offer.  Life can be hard, but it can also be a joy, and I intend to extract the maximum amount of joy from this life that can be done responsibility and prudently.

It might get stolen away from me, from us.  But I'll be damned if I am going to hand it over to them.

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