télos is a tumblelog.

It Is Enough

I have been told by a former professor and now friend, who I endearingly refer to as Papa Frank, to follow my bliss. This, I imagined, was some sort of specific career in which I would find myself and in doing so come to be completely happy, but a recent realization has changed my understanding of this.

I was sitting in my bed reading the Nicomachean Ethics when the thought came to me that it is enough what I am and desire to be. I desire to be a good person, a loving person, a person whose great love is the goodness of the human soul, a person who desires the divine above all else, and in desiring the divine, seeks to orchestrate the harmonious cultivation of beauty in others. More than this, however, I realized that being this is enough.

Looking back, I can see how this has been my bliss, but that I have wrongfully striven for desires that I ascertained to be good things. Some of these things I did in order to fully and completely follow my bliss, but I don’t think this is how it should work. Certainly one must pay the bills and put food on one’s table, but this should be done in concert with the seeking of one’s bliss, a task I have been woefully ignorant of. In being myself, however, I have cared for people around me, I have taken jobs that I have excelled at and have received accolades, recognition, and promotions, but I did not seek to be myself for any of these things. I did these things because it is who I believe I should be, because it is who I want to be. Nothing else really matters, and this not because jobs or career don’t matter, may such thoughts perish before the fullness of love. Rather, I have done all my work in love, and now that I understand my bliss, I can do all my work in this truth. My bliss is nothing more than to seek and cultivate beauty in all things. So, I shall seek the first which is the divine, and in doing so love the beauty that he has made in me which shall in turn compel me to love the beauty in others.

In the end, it is enough that all I want to be is a good and beautiful thing.