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Once, while going back to college after a long weekend, I woke early so I could get back to campus in time for an exam. It was a 4-hour drive, so I started before the sun. Unfortunately, I failed to get enough sleep the night before, and while driving on a lonely road, I fell asleep. To this day, I don’t know how I woke up on the opposite side of the road facing the same direction and on the grass still moving forward. Yet, I was uninjured, and my car was undamaged even though the road was a two-lane highway with a wide grassy ditch in between the lanes.
At times in my life, I felt similarly asleep at the wheel, relying on muscle memory and mental patterns to guide me.
“No one is without choice, and there is no constant like change.” -Passions of Eidos
When I was in my late teens, I was intrigued by examining philosophical questions. I have long been a student of differing ideas, as if they were virtual playthings of the mind. I found that we often play with concepts and modify them in ways that satisfy certain conclusions.
For example, it is generally considered moral that people be guided by societal rules of good and bad to be wealthy. Rules, based on ethical standards, such as that it is wrong to steal but even more egregious to steal from the poor. Stealing from the rich can almost be slightly more acceptable if people argue that wealthy people have more than is needed to survive, unlike poorer people. So aren’t we making an argument against a moral code based on a certain perspective?
It is clear that in our world today, one set of rules applies to the uber-wealthy, and another set of rules applies to the middle-income or poor. This can normalize a seemingly obvious moral conclusion, and someone’s acquisition of wealth is automatically called into question regardless of their social status. Do the ends justify the means? What is your answer?
Such fundamental questions of moral code form the philosophical practice of society, but begin with the individual. Your unique perspective on life dictates what you welcome and what you shut the door against.
Every so often, it is useful, if not necessary, to reexamine our individual philosophical or moral guidebook. If the ideas that support our choices are still true for us, helping us to discern for ourselves between good and bad, then we must rely on these basic truths. They define for us not just the laws we vote for, but more practically, and more specifically, our own day-to-day acts of living for ourselves within the constructs of society. Without discernment, we live as if we are driving a car, asleep at the wheel.
Choices, specifically personal choices, maintain a direction in our lives and must have consistency, meeting a substantive need or endgame that aligns with our ideas of what is good and bad. Any choices that clash with our ideals will put us off course, and at best, create unpredictability, or at worst, develop into destructive ones. In the reexamination of our moral compass, which must be intentional and honest, we can live in alignment through a series of life choices and course corrections, without which we are simply “checking out” in a state of non-awareness. Change is inevitable, but with intentional mental transformation, we evolve, alchemizing a new way of living that aligns with our ideals by choice, not as a reaction.
