12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

damaged Being. It’s payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible
miracle of your existence. It’s how you remember the Holocaust. It’s how
you make amends for the pathology of history. It’s adoption of the
responsibility for being a potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve
as an angel of Paradise.
Expedience—that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering
the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s
cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience,
multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon. It’s wrong
because expedience merely transfers the curse on your head to someone else,
or to your future self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future
generally, worse instead of better.
There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is
expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions
matter, or that the world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your
life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what
you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon
you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow
meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act
of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time,
properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best
it can at that moment.
What is expedient works only for the moment. It’s immediate, impulsive
and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what
would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being. Meaning is
what is put forth more powerfully than mere words can express by
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a triumphant bringing forth from the void of
pattern after pattern upon beautiful pattern, every instrument playing its part,
disciplined voices layered on top of that, spanning the entire breadth of
human emotion from despair to exhilaration.
Meaning is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange
themselves into a perfectly functioning harmony, from atomic microcosm to
cell to organ to individual to society to nature to cosmos, so that action at
each level beautifully and perfectly facilitates action at all, such that past,
present and future are all at once redeemed and reconciled. Meaning is what
emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening