The Italians have a great phrase, it's la dolce vita. It means the good life. I think we're all in our own ways searching for the good life. At this moment in history, I think we're pretty confused about what that looks like as a population, as a civilization.
What is the good life? I think a lot of people associate the idea of a good life with pleasure and possessions or prosperity or things like that. But that's not the good life, you know. And sometimes people might say, well, you know what? What's the secret to the good life? And really there's no secret to the good life.
The key to the good life, the center of the good life, the essence of the good life is goodness itself. You can't have a good life without goodness, and yet we seem to have switched our focus away from goodness, we seem to switched our focus away from from doing good and being good.
The reality is, is that when you're doing good, you know you're doing good. It's not a mystery. It's not a secret. You know, when you're when you're being good, when you're striving to be your best self, you know that you're you're in goodness, that you're striving for goodness when you place goodness at the center of a day or the center of a project or the center of a relationship. You know about that.
And so if we really want to live the good life La Dolce Vita, we have to rediscover goodness itself, we have to place goodness itself back at the center of our lives, back at the center of our society and people who say, well, you might think one thing is good and I might think another thing is good. Maybe.
Might be true in some things, but it's not true when it comes to goodness, you know, for thousands of years, long before Christianity even existed, virtue was celebrated in every culture. Patience, kindness, generosity, compassion, empathy, these are beautiful virtues, their virtues that were celebrated long before Christianity came into the world.
And the truth is. We prefer Virtu. In other people. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? We prefer virtue in other people. Would you prefer your neighbor be patient or impatient patient, right? You want a patient neighbor living next door. Would you prefer your neighbor be generous or stingy? Yeah.
You want your neighbor to be generous, you know, would you prefer your neighbor be kind and compassionate, you know, or selfish and thoughtless. You want a neighbor that's kind and compassionate. The same is true of your children, of your friends, of your spouse, of your colleagues. We prefer virtue in other people. But we don't give you a preferential position in our own lives, and so the call to the good life, the desire for the good life, is a desire for goodness itself and goodness itself.
If nothing else is defined in virtue to patient, people will always have a better relationship than to impatient people, to generous people will always have a better relationship than to selfish and stingy people. Virtue is at the heart of goodness. Virtue is at the heart of goodness. And so if we want to have the good life, we want to return to the good life. It has to be a return to virtue. It has to be a return to virtue.
And as we return to virtue, something else happens. It's like and it's like our karmic reaction. As we return to virtue, we see an explosion of joy in our lives.
Matthew Kelly
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