Business of Life

First Business

All too often the dailyness of our lives obscures life's very majesty.   

Our  inter-connection and inter-dependency on others is so deep we don't see it.  Whether its our food, sown, grown, and prepared for our consumption, our clothes made and sewn half a world away, our trash, removed and recycled far from our eyes, the people in factories that make our cars, our planes and trains, the researchers who find new ways to cure disease, making our lives healthier and longer, all those entrepreneurs who have brought us the technology we now can not live without, the people who entertain us, write for us, explore for us, pray for us. 

The numbers of people that have added to, supported or changed our lives is larger than we can comprehend.  In this dizzying interdependence, the golden rule -treating others the way we want to be treated - the greatest and simplest moral precept seems the only way to live.

Each of us must grown and develop our moral sense and character and that, I believe, is the first and most important business of our lives.  I've long believed that our personal character is our greatest wealth, one like education that can never be taken away.  Personal character is what we depend on to get us through life's most difficult times.  Growing through life and not just going through life is the point and there is no point in life where we can not grow more, we just can't grow backwards.    What Rumi wrote:

No mirror ever became iron again;
No bread ever became wheat;
No ripened grape ever became sour fruit.
Mature yourself and be secure from a change for the worse.
Become the light."

We hear and read in countless places that the time to learn about financial fitness is when you're young, so you can start saving, investing and giving early and reap the benefit of compound interest and long-term growth.  Youth is also the time to begin to develop a moral character , a fact intuitively grasped by millions of families who may not be believers but who insist on some sort of religious education for their children, if only to imbue with a moral sense.

The story that Varifrank relates in Robert the Counter shows what a profound effect some crippled children have on the students who came to work with them.    Such a lesson is never forgotten and the students are richer by far.