David Brooks, a well-known New York Times columnist defines two types of virtues:

“About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

"When I meet such a person, it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that ‘inner light.' I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.

"A few years ago, I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that, I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul. I was going to have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.

"It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, charitable, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

"Both of the two are building virtues, the only distinction between the two is that eulogy is a virtue we build up to the day we leave the world and, hopefully, after this life to work in hand, while the resume is a virtue we build to be equipped in the present. We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

"But if you live for worldly values, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.” (end of quote)

David Brooks talks about me and many friends I know deeply. People may not remember me for what I did or said. They remember me and will remember me by how I made them feel, how I connected with them in my heart. 

We are so accustomed to using the head language and the mind language, useful and necessary, but it is not enough. When I listen and relate with others with an open heart and open mind, I feel a deep connectedness, intimacy and oneness. Such experiences create and leave deep traces in my mind, in my heart and in my soul. As I am getting older (70 plus), I am getting richer in my heart and my relationships with people of all ages regardless of the outer shapes and their colors. Life is getting livelier, energizing, joyful and more meaningful. Eulogy virtues, those things about us that amount to how we are remembered, are too often overlooked.

The ultimate goal for all of us, individually and as a community, is to become victorious. The struggle against weaknesses is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason, compassion and character are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride, greed and self-deception. Everybody needs redemptive assistance from outside – from family, friends, ancestors, rules, traditions, institutions, exemplars, and, for believers, God. We all need these to tell us when we are wrong, to advise us on how to do right, to encourage, support, cooperate and inspire us along the way. 

There’s something democratic about life when viewed in this way. It doesn’t matter if you work in the corporate world or a charity taking care of the poor. There are heroes in all parts of life. The most important thing is that we are willing to engage in the struggle to set aside the résumé virtues and establish and maintain the eulogy virtues.

We can achieve some success by winning victories over others, but we build character by winning victories over the weaknesses in ourselves.

Southern Standard contributor Cordell Crawford can be contacted at crawfordcordell@yahoo.com