Where are You? What are You Doing?
I love Star Wars. The action is exciting, the effects are revolutionary, and the music is great but most importantly it tells a story of personal growth. Luke Skywalker goes from an average farmer to a man who not only saves the galaxy but redeems the soul of his father. This is an incredible transformation that I think hits home for most of us. After all we are all called to a similar transformation, a transformation from selfishness to selflessness. We are meant to live our lives for others. So how does Luke make this change in himself? Well to start he had some good teachers that helped him see where he needed to grow. This is exemplified in this line from The Empire Strikes Back when Yoda points out Luke’s fatal flaw.
“This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future… to the horizon… never his mind on where he was, what he was doing.”
How many of us find ourselves in this situation? I know I have. There have been many times in my life where I felt like Luke, always thinking about where I could be instead of where I was. I grew up in the country in Kansas. It seemed to me that the life that I wanted, a life of excitement, a life of greatness was beyond my present situation. I believed that I had very few opportunities in front of me so the story of a farm boy who made it off the farm and saved the universe felt personal to me. However, as I grew up I started to realize that I was overlooking the potential of the life I was living. Although looking to and romanticizing the future seems attractive, this attitude prevented me from making the changes necessary to achieve a better future. Our habits are created by the actions and choices that we are making in the present moment. A life of virtue is dependent on us having the self-awareness to know how our surroundings are affecting us right now and why we are doing the things that we do.
All of us are given opportunities in our everyday experiences to grow and to change ourselves for the better but we must start to recognize why we make the decisions that we do. This is especially important when it comes to the virtue of chastity. When we think only of the future or distract ourselves with podcasts, Youtube, or music we reject the self-knowledge required to make choices for others and not for ourselves. How can we expect ourselves to make good decisions if we aren’t fully present while making them? I have often been so lost in my own distractions that I could not recognize how my decisions were affecting myself and others.
To be virtuous is a constant commitment, a conscious decision to make good actions. Therefore taking time to examine our past decisions is an important step toward building virtue. We can do this through a daily examination of conscience. This is an evaluation of all the decisions we have made throughout the day to learn what actions we are naturally inclined to make. Through this we can see how things are affecting us and why we do the things that we do. With this knowledge we can better equip ourselves to make better decisions the next day. Making this effort to better know ourselves will allow us to make concrete changes to our lives and become the men and women we want to be. However, if we spend all our time ignoring the present moment while lost in distraction or an imaginary future, we will lose sight of the opportunities for growth right in front of us. Luke went on to become a man of virtue, a man who could see the good in his father and resist the temptation of the dark side. We too can achieve this kind of virtue but like Luke Skywalker we need to first be mindful of where we are and what we are doing.
