The truth is that Peter was not all that brilliant, and he probably would not have made it at medical school if Eloise hadn't nagged him through his endless exams while she earned rent and grocery money doing night duty as a nurse in the intensive care unit at Butterworth Hospital.
He and Eloise had some good times and some bad times together since Peter started practicing internal medicine ten years ago at a total care clinic in Amherst, Massachusetts. The best times, for Eloise, were the August weeks they spent at her father's cabin off the coast of southern Maine. The worst times were when she was pregnant, always very sick, not much fun to be with, and during which Peter would devote his spare time to a meaningful personal relationship he was cultivating, nothing sexual, mind you, but still fairly intimate, with a beautiful Amherst woman who was under his tender care for a chronic back-ache. In between the best and worst times were the times of muddling through the bringing up of two boys, refining their tennis serves, all while Peter needled his narrow way into a lucrative pocket of the well-paid medical fraternity of well-kept Amherst.
But then Peter actually fell in love, a freefall into the affections of one of those gifted women who get more exciting as they get older, a late bloomer, and a survivor who had entered law school at thirty-five after her divorce -mostly to prove to her ex-husband that she was more than equal to him -and had found herself in not time at all making a lot of money writing up trusts for rich folks trying to preserve their legacies. Endowed with a strong mouth, narrow nose, and long legs, she strode around in her Burberry coat and scarf, as if she were always just on time for an important appointment. But she never seemed hassled. Not only one to be indirect, blunt may be the word, she let Peter know soon enough that what she wanted from him was very close relationship. Stunned that an elegant woman like her was attracted to him, Peter fall in love, and out of commitment.
Eloise agreed a little too quickly with Peter that the blossom of their love had wilted into mutual toleration. She had gotten frumpy, she knew it, her intellectual curiosity had never been feverish, and the erotic current that in days almost forgotten had flown through their connected circuits had turned itself off during her second pregnancy. The apparent stability of their marriage was really a frayed blanket hiding Peter's nagging boredom.
But when Peter told her he wanted to leave and dared to ask for her blessing, he finally raised Eloise's dander.
"My Blessing"? You and that woman will burn in hell before you get my blessing, Peter. You made a commitment to me. You may get your middle-aged kicks from this snotty Amherst witch, but you are committed to me. Doesn't commitment mean anything to you, Peter?
" Commitment? You talk commitment when my happiness is at stake? Our happiness is a lot more important than sticking to a lousy commitment we made lifetime ago. Give me one good reason why I should stuck with it now, just when I finally have something good going for me?"
Why? Why? Just because you made it. That's why."
Is that why we keep commitment's? Just because we made them?
Its not enough reason for my self-maximizer.
Having spelled the beans, I'll have to tell you more about my self-maximizer. He is the gi-getter inside of me who tells me that my first job in life is to realize my potential. I have a simmering potful of uncooked potential within me, and my self-maximizer believes that I have a right, maybe a duty, to bring it to a boil.
My self-maximizer is the part of me that whispers exciting things to me about my untested capacity to feel things I have never felt, experience things I have never experienced, become things I have only dreamt about becoming.
He hints that commitment keeping is a sucker's game-a moral scam to cheat people such as Peter and me out of their last chance for happiness. He tells me that I might be a lot better off if I kept myself free to cut bait and move on if I wasn't catching my legal limit of satisfaction.
When his twin, the commitment keeper inside of me, reminds me that I have promises to keep, my self-maximizer suavely nudges me to invoke the bottom line of happiness: why should I let a mere commitment stand in the way of my inalienable right to the pursuit of total fulfillment?
So, having admitted that my own private self-maximizer tends to take Peter's point of view, I will consider Peter's question as if it were my own: why should Peter, or I or you, put commitments are better people than those who don't.
The virtue of commitment keeping is not its own reward.
I grant that fidelity is an attractive quality in a person. We used to call it a vitue- which means it is one of the qualities we look for in first-rate people. Being a staunch person, a person of fealty, a loyal person, is to have the mark of excellence on you. Staying with sinking ships and losing causes, this is the stuff of virtue. Agreed. But, contrary to pious opinion, virtue is seldom its own reward, and the virtue of commitment keeping never is.
Becoming jut-jawed persons who preen themselves on their moral luster is not the reward we get for sticking to commitments. The reward for commitment keeping is a better kind of life for people who care about each other.
Some people sweat and snort through daily workouts so that they will be fit enough to sweat and snort through the workouts. Why do you jog?" I asked my perspiring friend. "To keep fit," he answered. "And why do you want to keep fit? I asked. So that I can be in shape to jog," he replied. Good enough reason for fanatics, I suppose.
But surely we are not bound to commitments so that we can get in shape to keep our commitments. So that, in turn, we can look good to the connoisseurs of virtue
I know of a man who makes a major production of his commitment keeping. He expects his grateful family to praise him with a morning hymn, "Great is Thy Faithfulness," at every breakfast time.
Everybody in town knows him for his moral character. He gets a loan from the bank, anytime, without collateral, on his reputation as a commitment keeper. Good old dependable Joe.
He reminds Janine, his wife, if his selfless devotion to their marriage, reminds her constantly; it always gives him an advantage. His voice slides into the nasal register, bordering on a sneer, as he reminds her of how he has never given her reason to doubt his fidelity, though, God knows, he has had chances enough.
He let's her know that he sticks around, not because she is worth sticking to, but because he is such a loyal character. So when he struts his commitment -keeping stuff, he ends up leaving Janine feeling like an unwanted woman who is cleaved to only because her husband is too moral to leave her.
Something almost always goes wrong when we keep our commitment out of commitment to our own commitment keeping. French novelist Francois Mauriac tells a story about someone he had the inspiration to call THE WOMAN OF THE PHARISEES. This woman, the grande dame of the valley, very rich in houses and land, was committed to the poor people in her village, visiting them all regularly, always leaving behind a gift suitable to their needs-as she saw them-along with a suggestion that a little more ambition and s little more thrift could improve their situation. She never left s poor family's house without making them feel worse for her having been there.
She flogged them with her commitment to them. And they hated her for the gifts almost as much as they hated themselves for accepting them. What she was committed to was her reputation as a rich woman committed to poor people.
Mauriac's story reminds me of an epitaph written by C.S. Lewis:
Erected by her sorrowing brothers
In memory of Martha Clay.
Here lies one who lived for others.
Now she was peace. And so have they.
In sum, getting to be virtuous is not reason enough to persuade us that commitment keeping is a rung or two higher on the ladder of life's duties than looking out for our own happiness.
What makes commitment keeping worth working at is this: it serves the long term good of people in relationship, people who want to live in caring human community. That's the beginning and the end of it. We can create a good life together only out of trust. And trust, to make it last, needs commitment.
We need to know that people who promise to be with us are really going to be there. If we all lived as strictly free-floating, unfettered, self-enhancing individuals, we would all be left hanging in the vacuum of each other's undependability. We need something firmer.
Commitments give it to us. They create small islands of security for us in our oceans of insecurity. They make enclaves of steadiness in the jungles of change. They give us the only human basis for trusting each other. For counting on each other.
Commitment is the invisible fiber that binds a collection of individuals into a caring community. A large one or a small one. Everything depends on it. Everything from a family reunion to a concord of nations, from calling a committee meeting to founding a nation, from calling a committee meeting to founding a nation, from celebrating high mass to getting a return trip ticket to Pasadena. Not to mention a lasting marriage. Or a good friendship.
Maybe you can have a regime, or a gang, or a crowd, or a prison full of inmates, or even a foreign legion, without commitment, but you cannot have a human community. The only way, anywhere, anytime, create a good human relationship within a caring community is by daring to make and caring to keep commitments to each other.
So my answer to Peter's question -why should I stay with a commitment when happiness calls away? Is the answer I give to my own self-maximizer: the reason for keeping our commitments to each other is that, in the long run, and -as T.S. Eliot reminded us- there is no human life that is not lived in human community.
Let me sum up: the right kind of commitment keeping makes good sense because it is the only way to keep good human relationship alive. And good human relationships make everybody's life better.
Commitments are worth the effort and, sometimes, the sacrifice, because, when all is said and done, people are almost always better off because of them. If we keep them the way they are meant to be kept-with care as well as with consistency -we are laying the foundation for the only kind of life fit for human beings. This is ultimately why commitment keeping is worth a try.
When my persistent self-maximizer asks for one single and sound reason why I should keep my commitments even more than I should maximize myself, I tell him what I have told you: it is better for us, and it makes life better for other people, if we make and keep commitments to each other. But there are more reasons than this. And we have to see how it works out in the fire and smoke of real life, where people are not always able to keep the commitments they have made.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing