Enduring Values

Wisdom accumulates within one’s own life and lasts in myriad cultural deposits, such as the Book of Ecclesiastes. Wisdom is a larger category that contains enduring values of self and culture.

From a philosophy of life perspective, what endures? This is what I’ve found and with which conventional wisdom agrees.

Life matters. The old Stoics recommended that one should now and again reflect upon mortality. The Latin term is memento mori.The reflection need only be fleeting, and it should bring you to a realization and appreciation of the fleeting moment. Consistent with our moral instincts, the realization of one’s own life leads to empathy and compassion with other life and the Web of Existence. For each of us there is no greater gift than our life, nothing more precious than the life around us. Nature has bought Life into being and found clever means to pass Life through the generations. 

The Mind matters. Experience joined to more formal education, processed by imagination and reason, produces our individual consciousnesses. Each of us is a rich and complex world, unique and at the center of the universe. Let us be curious and free thinking.

Connections/Relationships matters.  By nature, we humans are social creatures. We’re all in this together. Simply put we need one another for a variety of reasons and purposes.  The deeper connections go by the name of love. My recently deceased colleague Forrest Church proposed that our immortality rests upon love, the love that endures though we have died. The philosopher Martin Buber beguiled us with transcendent nature of subject-subject encounters, the purest state of being reaching to the Divine. A deep or mystical consciousness recognizes the extent of our connections, which we often express as an ‘interdependent web of existence.”

My fourth and final enduring value is work and the results of work.Work matters.  Ecclesiastes declares, “Whatever your hands finds to do, do with all your might.” I agree. Work is the means by which we meet the world, discover self, and make our special contribution, embedding our values just where we are.

When I first started my ministry, I took to heart a wise colleague’s advice on how to attain immortality: plant a tree, raise a child, or write a poem—all aspects of one’s Life work.

Happiness flows from an ever-growing alignment of self with enduring values.

Hold LIFE in a gentle/strong embrace.

Only CONNECT.

Let your MIND be free and expansive.

Do your WORK, your vocation as well as your avocation, with dedication and purpose.

Infuse these enduring values into your life and you will repose in happiness.