A Virtuous Life
The essay by Renata Solomou that I am sharing here is a must-read.
At its most precise: virtuosity is the consistent practice of excellence in character. Not talent. Not belief. Not identity. Practice. Repeated choice.
But excellence in character requires a definition too, because consistency alone is not virtue. History has given us plenty of people who were consistent in the wrong direction. The discipline of a soldier following orders he knows are wrong is not virtue. The loyalty of a person who protects corruption to preserve belonging is not virtue. Consistency without direction is just persistence, and persistence in the wrong direction compounds the damage with every passing day. What makes a practice virtuous is where it points, toward what expands capacity, toward what builds rather than destroys, toward what leaves the world more whole than it found it. That floor is not ideological. It is not religious. It appears in every culture that has ever tried to organize itself around something worth protecting, across centuries and continents and belief systems that agree on almost nothing else. Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t destroy what belongs to someone else. Strip away every belief system that has ever housed those principles and what remains is the simplest possible operating system for human beings living alongside other human beings, for the planet they were given, and for everything they were trusted to protect.