There are many battles that must be fought in life, many challenges overcome, many difficulties to navigate. But anyone who tells you that the most significant moral struggle you will face in your life is with someone else is not telling you the truth. The nearest, most decisive, longest, most numerous and varied, and most difficult moral struggles you will ever face will be fought on the battleground of your own individual heart. They will arise every day, and they will affect the course of your life in every moment until the day you die.
The greatest differences among people do not lie between them, but within them. Who is going to show up today? Who will you be today? The amount of difference granted by the the power of human choice and determination is almost incalculable. The choices of a single person at a key moment can turn the wheel of history. But even for those of us not so crucially placed, we have our hands on the wheel of our own universe of being, and how we direct ourselves in every moment can affect the course of the present and the future, and it can drastically affect the lives of those closest to us. So, even as insignificant and small as we may seem, there exists a whole world within us. The world of who we are and the world of who we could be.
So don’t lay all your sweat and tears on the power of social forces. You’re not likely to ever meet one you can look in the eye and talk to. But you will meet many, many people. There’s only so much power and efficacy we can wield over something we can’t ever see or touch or speak to. We can only ever be a person. But what sort of person will we be? Kind, patient, generous, respectful, helpful, forgiving, humble, hardworking, grateful, peaceful, courageous?
There is a far greater world of difference between who we could be and who we choose to be, for better or worse, than between any other difference within our identity. I am a man and my wife is a woman. There are so many differences between us because of that one fact. But there are so many other things about us that make us alike. And there is a far greater difference still between the kind of person I could be if I gave in to all my worst instincts in our relationship, and who I could be if I upheld all my best ambitions. There’s the difference between a monster or a saint waiting to be born into existence, if I let myself tip the balance decisively one way or the other.
We aren’t given the power to choose the time or place we will be born into. We can’t choose how tall or strong or beautiful or clever we will be. We can’t choose what other people will be born to surround us. It isn’t our choice to choose the past that births us, and because it isn’t within our power to determine it isn’t to our account to be judged. It is simply a given. It is our landscape, our moment, our part of the burden of humanity, our field to till. What weather we shall have is beyond our power to command.
All we have power over, the one thing that does lie to our account, is what we do and who we become with the time and the place that are given to us. Thanks to chance, thanks to fortune, thanks to wise planning, thanks to the long and hard efforts of those before us we could not demand, some of us may be fortunate. Some of us may find many stones already removed from our paths, much stored up for us, and a way to continue in that prosperity laid out for us. But we all have the potential to lose or to gain everything in our lifetime. We all have to carry the present on our shoulders and decide is we will leave riches or ruin to those who come after us.
To put it simply, your life matters. Now, that is such a wonder and such a terror that for many people it’s almost too much to bear. We would rather surrender our autonomy and efficacy rather than bear the weight of such a catastrophic burden of destiny. We would rather be mere pawns or children or mechanisms than have to shoulder the call to account for our own freedom and potential. We are not somehow less than those who came before us. Look what they went though. Look what they achieved, what they survived, to get us to this point. Look what they learned, what they overcame, what terrible mistakes they made, what work they did to raise themselves out of it.
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