When Virtue is Lacking

Some days, I feel I’ve been dropped into someone else’s dream, a world I do not recognize.

Leaders with the judgment and appetites of adolescents wage wars for the sake of ego. Aggression and naked power are rewarded. Respect for the rule of law, even a sense of basic fairness, is eroding. Personal values like character and integrity are mocked as naive. The fever of greed is growing into a cancer. The structures of society are warped when they no longer serve society, but are manipulated to funnel obesity to a few while millions scratch out a bare existence.

And these could be the early days. It sickens me to watch humanity’s slow descent into moral madness. We are capable of being so much better.

I can’t help thinking this is not the game I came to play, that I am living in the wrong time, one not suited to my talents and temperament. My talents are collaboration, friendship, warmth. I am here to foster good relations, positive regard, mutual respect. My temperament is accommodating, inquisitive, willing to overlook false exteriors to see where goodness is hiding. My soft skills seem wasted in a landscape so harsh. I want to call out to the Gods, “Why am I here at this time? What is being asked of me?”

I want a thunderclap, but there is only silence. So I sit with my questions, and my longing, and my aching grief. Silence, actively encountered, is not nothing. It is a void, but it is fertile, a place worth visiting. When I slow my mind, gaps appear. Fresh insights sneak through the cracks, sprouting among my complaints, like this: Perhaps what is being asked of me is to grow.

Our evolution, both personal and cosmic, has never advanced in times of ease, but only in the heat of friction, where our vision of what can be abrades against the world as it is. I have a talent for words, an ability to describe events that sheds light into the corners. My temperament is steadfast, willing to endure. The bag of tools I carry may be exactly what is needed to show what decency looks like, more striking in its contrast. The mirror may arouse kindness in hearts where it lies dormant. The modeling of virtue by people of virtue is its own kind of power.

We are going somewhere. An intuition deep in the grain of my being tells me we are on a path of progress, that our current times are not a devolution, but a temporary backslide, and that we each have something to give that adds momentum to the good. Why, then, would I consider retreating? How can I expand the limits of virtue if I don’t pursue it, if I fade in the face of difficulty to tend my bruises and abrasions? When virtue is lacking in the world, it is needed most from me.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash