HOW TO BECOME VIRTUOUS

We do not come out of the womb as virtuous people. We are selfish, very selfish. We cry because we have been forced to live in a new environment. When we are hungry, we want fed and we want fed immediately. We want to be the center of attention and we get it. It does not matter if it is in the middle of the night or the middle of something that is very important in the life of our parents. That’s their problem. We have a problem, a need, and we want it tended to and at once.

Not very virtuous, is it? In fact, it is quite self-serving. It doesn’t get much better as we grow older. Our wants and needs, no matter what our age, always trump those of anyone else, even those we are supposed to love, even those who love us when, perhaps because of our selfishness, they would rather not. Left to our own desires and devises we would become quite selfish and virtues of any kind would be quite absent in our lives.

That is why we have to learn to become virtuous; but first we have to realize that being virtuous is something that we want to become. We only come to that understanding because we have seen virtuous people in action, seen how it is much better to give than to receive, to love even when love is not returned, to hope in the face of adversity, to believe in the goodness of others even when our head tells us we are foolish. Virtue is taught by others before it is learned by ourselves.

Others give us a glimpse of what the virtuous life is like. We see it and then we want that life for ourselves. That is the first step in becoming a virtuous person. We have to want to change our way of living because we have come to understand that there is a better way to live, a more joyful and fruitful and fulfilling way to live all because we have seen people living that way, living that virtuous life.

The next step is figure out how to become such, what steps we must take to reach that goal, what changes in our behavior must be made in order to attain it, realizing that those steps will be difficult because any change in life and in lifestyle is always difficult. The older we are in undertaking a change, the more difficult. “I’m too old to change” is said for a reason!

Those steps involve changing our habits, changing the ways we usually respond to situations. And as we all know, habits are very, very hard to break because they have become part of our standing operating procedure, as they say, our MO. We “always” act that way, respond that way, think that way. To act and respond and think differently requires a change in habit. That does not come easily.

That’s the easy part: knowing what habits we have to break and new habits we have to cultivate in order to live a virtuous, even a more virtuous life. The hard part is putting those new habits into practice. The good news is that we have done it before. As selfish as we were coming out of the womb, we have become less selfish and more loving. It is only when a habit has become a way of life that we have attained our goal. Even then we have to keep on practicing that virtuous habit.