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The Ethics of Shaping a Life

What makes for a well-lived life? How does one go about making educational and career choices that enable one to lead such a life? And how can schools, parents, and other concerned adults help young people make more life-giving choices? Having thought about and struggled with these questions myself, I am delighted to add my voice to the ongoing conversations related to character formation and ethics at Emory and beyond.

I believe that the best western religious, philosophical, and poetic traditions speak with a unified voice on this question. The novelist and theologian Frederick Buechner writes on the meaning of vocation, "The place that God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." The philosopher Charles Taylor writes that living an authentic life means nurturing one's own spark of originality and creativity against "horizons of significance," namely something larger and more enduring than oneself. And in "Two Tramps in Mudtime," Robert Frost writes of uniting "my avocation and my vocation / as my two eyes make one in sight."

The common theme espoused by Buechner, Taylor, and Frost? A well-lived life combines both joy and service, originality and accountability, that which one loves to do and that which needs to be done in the world.

How does one go about making educational and career choices that enable one to lead a good life?

I have observed time and again that the people who seem happiest and most fulfilled in what they are doing and who also seem to make the greatest contribution to the world around them are continually asking themselves, consciously or unconsciously, three basic questions over the course of their lives, and they are moving toward fields of action where their answers to these three questions intersect:

(1) What do I like to do? What gives me energy when I do it? What am I excited about getting out of bed each day to do? When is work play? And during what activities do I experience time as flying by?

(2) What am I good at doing? What particular skills, talents, and aptitudes do I possess? What subjects and tasks to I pick up easily? Where might I have a particular genius - even if it is "just" a genius for listening to others or for organizing people and resources to achieve a goal?

(3) What needs to be done in the world? Where is life broken in some respect? What cause or group of people needs help? What products or services do people need? What would be a worthy use of my personal resources and talents, of my life's energies?

These questions may sound simple, but it is no easy matter to hold them in the forefront of one's mind and shape one's life accordingly. Young people may face parental, peer, or financial pressures that seem to limit their ability to find or to create and live from their own sweet spots at least some of the time.

How can schools, parents, and other concerned adults help young people make more life-giving choices?

Charles Taylor says that authenticity requires "a self-definition in dialogue." Ethicist Michael Rion speaks of the need for "communities of conscience." With a little attention and imagination, teachers, parents, and other concerned adults can find and create ways to engage young people in conversation, formally and informally, around these questions. We can help them to gain greater insight into their interests and talents, as well as a deeper sense of connection to the larger world. We can encourage them to try lots of new things. And we can share stories of how we, and others we know, have tried to put our own three circles together.

Our challenge as educators and concerned adults is to immerse young people in ethically-enriched conversations that lift their vision and encourage their hearts. By continually engaging them in these kinds of conversations, we send them a vital message: who they are and what they have to offer matters to us and to the world. And we help them begin to trust their own experience - and their hearts - as the basis for shaping their lives with integrity, ethical sensitivity, and passion.

[ Posted by Andy Fleming at February 1, 2000 10:25 AM | More Opinion articles ]

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