The Good Life

The word came to my mind only a few days ago.

Eudaemonia

A classist term coined by your best friend, Aristotle. Maybe the word had deeper roots Hellenistic roots, but all the etymological sources point to a sublime state of happiness. As such it comes right in the crosshairs of any American. Happiness is our thing. It’s what we claim as the objective of our spiritual, practical, and political life. It’s what we pursue. So adamantly we deem this word at the center of our deepest desire that we etched it into the constitution and to our general psyche, to our raison d’être.

Wrapping up summer, I call it the good life. For me it’s as much a fusion of a quotidian life as much as a creative one. It is, if it’s working, a harmonious balance of needs met and, more than that, needs altogether novel and undiscovered incrementally revealed. Anything else, anything falling short is wayward, a cheat, an inexorable snare tethered to an unescapable trap. Maybe, some with discernment somewhere between Aristotelian, Dantesque, and Lovecraftian would think of this turnabout from the eudaemonian highway as none other than hades.

So, with the winds of autumn at our heels, ready to dress down the yellowing canopy that reveal the naked trunks and branches of trees, I turn again to the work. The work is that other side of daily living things which lift me above, far above the weight of the mundane, the colloquial, the merely banal. And the merely banal is what I’d call this new age. An overly sweetened easy life of distractions and twisted wishes fulfilled.

With fall at hand, I wonder what will I shed, what will I cut loose?