A day last week began very badly. My cab driver, despite instructions to stick to his own half of the road, didn’t do so, and bumped into a two wheeler. To be precise, our car hit the ankle of the lady who was riding pillion. It obviously hurt her, she was sobbing. The driver was absolutely unapologetic and when I got down to check on her and apologise, he asked me to get back in! The traffic was piling up and the clock was ticking for a meeting I had at 11. I got in, and have felt miserable since then.
It also has to do with the fact that a decade back, we (or D, rather) were at the receiving end of exactly this. That night, it was the kindness of a family in Koramangala that helped us get some semblance of control over the situation. Their connection with the event was just that it happened in front of their house. The driver of the car which hit us (his family was with him) gave us the slip on the way to the hospital. Meanwhile, with D’s leg in a cast, it was a harrowing month for both of us. All of this was playing in my head, and I felt feel very guilty for not cancelling the ride and doing what I could to help.
Compassion (and kindness) get written about here a lot, and I am never happy when I cannot act on my belief systems, whatever the circumstances might be. Perhaps I am guilty of what David Brooks has pointed out – “..lacking a moral vocabulary, they tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions.”
Another stream that occupies a lot of space on this blog is purpose. A very popular quote, attributed to Mark Twain, is The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why. I always used to consider the latter some sort of one-time epiphanic act or experience that will answer a very important question. But maybe it isn’t that. In terms of scale, maybe it’s something more in line with what George Eliot calls out (in the context of large scale moral ambitions) as “…tied to the here and now, directed by honest feelings for this or that individual rather than for humanity as a whole”
The more I read, the more I think and the more I experience the world, and the more I understand myself, I feel the two streams are connected, and they are both linked to happiness. I have mostly been thinking of ‘purpose’ as something external that answers an internal ‘why am I here?’ question. Maybe I am wrong on that. To borrow from George Eliot (again)
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The job is to ensure the here and now happens, daily. As David Brooks notes, the act precedes the virtue.