This question has been vexing me for some years now: what does it mean to live a Good Life?
In many ways, the life I lead now is by all means, especially when seen from the eyes of a stranger, a rather charmed existence. I have a good job, a boss that I respect and admire, colleagues who are smart and hardworking and kind. My mother is still alive and well and healthy; we try to see each other for breakfast every weekend. I share a life with an intelligent, kind, whip-smart woman who continues to teach me so much about the important things in life. I have my books, and a lovely and cosy home; I have my health and my friends and my sanity. Nothing much to complain about, really.
And yet, perhaps it is a natural affliction for those who enter into the fourth decade of their existence. When the hairline starts thinning out, when the fertile soil of your youthful ambitions have settled down into the rutted pathways of a life lived more than halfway through, that question will emerge: Is this all there is? It can be an incessant and sometimes deafening question.
The problem with trying to live a Good Life (well perhaps one of the many problems associated with that aspiration) is that we are all often too easily seduced into wanting things that we never truly need. Money, Power, Status, Lust: these and many other prized possessions of what we consider to be the essence of modern existence, they all too often will ring hollow in our hands when all those years of grasping finally brings the desired prize into our hands.
Not more than a year ago, my father-in-law passed away, when I was into the final days of a glorious transcontinental trip across Asia and Europe. It was morning in Brussels when I found out that Ayah had died. He was someone I really looked up to: a man who made a fortune for himself by climbing up the ladder of life, and made something for himself out of the scant endowments of his impoverished youth.
His passing, so sudden and so unexpected, knocked me sideways. I suppose we all deal with grief in our own ways. My own response to Ayah’s passing was to question my own sense of existence, and to bring me closer to an awareness of mortality.
We all know we will die some day. But that fact really scares the living daylights out of us. Death is scary. And so we busy ourselves with board meetings and skiing holidays and newfangled bicycles and shiny sports cars: anything to take our minds off from that impending moment of inexorable finality.
I don’t know how much time I have left of this earth. None of us really do. But Ayah’s passing has made me more determined to find a way to a Good Life. Not a life that is obsessed with amassing Goods – the jewels and baubles of a modern capitalist economy. Nor a life that is obsessed about chasing for Greatness, clamouring for the accolades of a fickle audience or hurling oneself unthinkingly into the Sturm und Drang of Promethean desires. But a life that is calm and quiet and fulfilling. A life filled with goodness and good works.
I am still trying to figure out what this all means, and more importantly, what such a life might mean in the context of my own existence. But I am increasingly convinced that living a Good Life is about finding your path through life, as true and as authentic as you can be to the person you are always becoming, even as Life keeps throwing stuff at you that often feels too much to handle.
As I get older, I get more easily irritated with charlatans who try to sell you some easy Indomee formula to life. As if all you need to succeed and thrive and be happy in life is some neatly-packaged life of Habits, or merely to be able to uncover some secret Law of existence, or simply to be able to decode some sort of Universal Conspiracy.
Life is messy. Buddha said that Life is Suffering. Even Muhammad, resplendent in his moral majesty, “frowned and turned away” in a moment of weakness that was quickly put aright by Revelation.
We can only muddle through as best we can. And this is true, even for the best of us.