The Virtue of Courtesy

Whenever my brother and I walk our mom's dog, we always bring poop bags with us, often more than we think we'll need. We always clean up after our dog, and we sometimes clean up after other people's dogs, too. It's just polite, like picking up litter and tidying up messes. We try to make the neighborhood we share with others a better place for our having been here, rather than a worse one.

We should all try to practice this kind of courtesy. We should all try to make life better for the people around us, or at least try not to make life worse. We should try to accommodate and care for others. We should try to lift them up rather than tear them down. We should clean up our own messes as best we can, and we should quietly help others with their messes as well. I think the world would be a much better place if we all had this commitment to the virtue of courtesy.

Too often, I find evidence of people making life worse for others. I smell cigarette or weed smoke. I see broken alcohol bottles and other trash. I see how people are hurting themselves and creating discomfort and danger for the people around them. But I, whose thankfully better-hidden pot is no less black than their brutally visible kettle, try not to judge. I have to work at trying not to make my problems other people's problems, as we all should. While it's wise to seek and accept help when needed and/or offered, it's courteous to try not to create problems for others.

As with most of my blog posts, this message isn't actually directed at any of you. These are lessons that I am learning and that I still need to learn. If you learn something too, that's great. I hope we can make the world better together. But these messages are mostly directed to me. I'm glad that I try to clean up my own and other people's messes. I should keep that up, and I should try not to make any more messes than I can't avoid making. I try to make other people's lives better, and that's good, but I should also keep trying very hard not to make anyone's life worse.

We all have to live with each other, some more closely than others. We should all do our parts to make and keep this world a comfortable place for everyone to live in together.

In the Right Place at the Right Time

Yesterday, I got lucky, or rather, I was blessed, to be the right person at the right place at the right time so that I could be a blessing to others.

I slept in a little bit yesterday morning. I knew I'd have some time between my morning exercise and my first tutoring appointment, so I cut into that time by half an hour so I could rest for another half hour before catching the bus to school.

On my way to school, I saw someone I recognized: the man with the lunchbox, whom I often run into while waiting for the bus. That morning, he was going for a walk with his wife and kid. His wife, having walked a bit ahead, paused to let them catch up. But the place at which she stopped was in front of someone's driveway, and that someone was ready to leave.

Something I haven't mentioned about the man and his wife before, because it wasn't relevant before, is that the two of them seem deaf, and I am now confident that at least the wife is. I've never seen either of them communicate audibly, just with signs. And when the person whose driveway the wife was blocking asked her to move and even honked at her, she couldn't hear him and didn't notice him.

But I, having happened to notice their deafness in our previous interactions, and having tweaked my schedule slightly to have happened to be there at that moment, knew what was going on, and I was able to step in to help. I informed the driveway owner that the woman was deaf, nonverbally got the woman's attention, and directed her attention to the man in the car in the driveway behind her. She cleared the way, the man drove away, and I felt lucky to have been the right person in the right place at the right time.

It felt then, and it feels now, that God had been working through me to make that little miracle happen. This is odd because I hadn't felt like I was being directed. I had chosen to change my schedule that morning because I was tired and lazy, not because I got the impression that it was, for some reason, important to leave later than normal that day.

A similar "coincidence" had happened years ago when I had taken a stray pitbull to the pound and was able to adopt her a week later with timing that seemed too lucky to have been mere luck. I hadn't felt impressed to leave the dog at the pound; I was just doing what I had thought was the best thing to do, and by some miracle, I turned out to have been right. God had turned my mistake into a miracle, and yesterday morning, He turned my laziness into a miracle, too.

God is very good at working miracles through imperfect people. We make mistakes and bad decisions every day. And yet, more often than is probable, those mistakes can work out to somehow have been the best thing we possibly could have done. I'm grateful that God is pulling strings to make miracles out of the decisions we make, and that, regardless of where we go, what we do, or when we leave, we frequently (miraculously) tend to end up in the right place at the right time.

X Is As X Does

This morning, following a conversation I had previously had about cowardice, I sort of stumbled into the maxim, "X is as X does." Traits and behaviors are good or bad to the extent that they cause or reduce happiness or suffering. For example, cowardice is sometimes evil in that it prevents people from taking actions that would prevent or alleviate harm. Yet, cowardice is not always evil. There are times when no bravery is required, so the cowardice does no harm. Cowardice is as cowardice does. In the cases where the cowardice does nothing wrong, there is nothing wrong with the cowardice.

This maxim may also apply to other things, even to good things. Normally, my blog is a good thing, because it encourages the generation and sharing of spiritually-uplifting and informative thoughts. But last night, my blog wasn't as helpful. The thoughts I generated last night weren't really worth sharing, and they certainly weren't worth stay up that late for. In fact, insofar as my blog kept me up later than was healthy for me, it could be said that my blog was, at least in that moment, harmful. Of course, the same could be said for many of the activities I engage with. Sometimes, they are good in that they cause happiness and help to reduce the harm caused by stress, and other times, they cause harm by keeping me up late. The activities themselves are neither good nor bad, but their effects can be either.

Some people say that "evil is as evil does," and I think it's true. Evil actions and traits are considered "evil" because of the evil (or the suffering) that those traits and actions cause. Similarly, good actions and traits are good because of the good that they do. It's all well and good to say that you have charity, empathy, and compassion, but unless you actually practice those traits, they aren't actually doing any good.

I only stumbled into this maxim this morning, but I currently think that it's a good rule of thumb to judge by. We can tell whether is something is good or evil by the good or evil they do. And since traits can have multiple effects, some good, some bad, those traits can be a mix of good and bad, along with everything else. We can judge everything by its actions, effects, and results, and we can tell whether something is good or bad based on the good or the bad that it does.

Out of Energy. Out of Time.

There are many events from today that I could blog about, but a lot of them are morally nuanced enough that it would take a good deal of time and energy to unpack them. I was dangerously low of energy hours ago, and now I am also desperately low on time. You're not going to get a quality blog post from me tonight. I'd apologize for that, but I'm even more sorry that I didn't give up sooner so I could go to bed at a reasonable time. At least I can go to bed now.

Quiet Fun with Family

I'm normally kinda anti-social. I find people tiring, and I dislike the amount of noise people tend to make. But tonight was different. Tonight, I just spent the evening with members of my household. We played a board game and a few rounds of UNO, we had family prayer and scripture study, and we watched my brother play a video game I introduced him to. It was mostly just a fun, chill, quiet evening, and I really enjoyed it.

Normally, I get overwhelmed with too many people making too much noise, but this small, quiet evening with a handful of family members was a very pleasant evening for me.

Grow Through What You Go Through

I had an opportunity to spend some time with my slightly-extended family at a park this evening. It was a great time, with lots of good food and fun playing together. While we were playing, I noticed that one of my nieces was wearing a shirt that said something like "Grow through what you go through," and I thought that was a good message, especially for the young.

We all have growing up to do, and we all have life experiences that can help us do it. The trick is to actually use our experiences to help us grow, rather than just experiencing them. We need to look for the lessons we can learn from our experiences, and we need to use our experiences to help us practice Christlike attributes. These skills are especially useful for younger people, since they have the most growing to do and the most experiences ahead of them, but the skills are also useful for the rest of us. As long as we have experiences ahead of us, we would do well to learn how to use them to grow.

Some say that our experiences, especially our negative ones, are our greatest teachers. I'm not sure I fully agree with that, but I do think that, as long as we need to go through suffering, we might as well use it to help us grow.

Sharing Adventure

One of the things I love most about the games I play is the ability to share adventures with my friends. Case in point, I played a single-player game and got my brother interested in it as well, and now I get to watch him experience the same adventure I went on, but in his own way. I get to celebrate his accomplishments with him, marvel at his ability to find secrets far more easily than I ever did, and offer him advice when it's needed and/or especially helpful. We got to laugh together when he tossed a fire bomb in a pool of water, and it went out instead of exploding, and we got to work out some of the details of the interactions of the magic items. My brother is having fun, and I'm having fun with him.

I really like this aspect of the games I play. I like being able to share thrilling experiences with my friends through games. And it doesn't even have to be through just games. Our lives themselves can be adventures. And one of the best parts of these adventures is being able to share them with others.