Ethics, Fitness, and Raising the Bar

In my last post, I talked about links between physical, mental, and spiritual development and health. Now I want to expand on that a bit more and speak about what I find one of the most interesting themes of all types of development – the establishment of standards.

Standards

Until about halfway through college, I thought I was in pretty good physical shape. I hadn’t gained weight since high school, I could pass my ROTC tests with flying colors, I worked out – or at least thought about working out – on a regular basis, and I didn’t eat anything too bad. Then I discovered powerlifting. And kickboxing. And body fat percentage. And I realized I was in pretty lousy shape; I had really been skating by and missing the whole point of fitness in my rush to keep the rules of dieting and exercise.

With character, we find the same thing. I might think I’m doing pretty decently: people generally think I’m nice, I can pass any ethics test with ease, I help other people –  or think about helping other people – on a regular basis, and I don’t do anything too bad. But if I never bother comparing myself to the real standard, I may reach the end of my life and figure out I missed the whole point of ethics in my rush to keep the rules of niceness and morality.

Perspective

Now, finding the standard may be harder than it first appears, because from the bottom end of the scale, our view tends to be distorted. Returning to fitness: in my experience, if you’re just starting out, everyone with a gym membership looks about the same. It’s only once you get a gym membership, once you make a commitment and get involved, that you realize you’re just in the foothills; you haven’t even started on the real mountain yet.

Or consider a mental aspect of this – language learning. When you’re first starting a language, everyone with a year or more on you seems like they’re fluent. But when you yourself have been studying a year and you still don’t understand a word you’re reading, you figure out you have a long way to go.

In the same way, it may seem like everyone who, say, doesn’t cuss, or goes to church regularly, or volunteers every weekend, is “fluent” in morality. But this confusion only shows that we are still at the very bottom of the ladder; we have not yet understood what ethics is all about. I can’t go very deep into that now, other than to say that ethics is much less about rules and much more about finding and fulfilling your purpose, walking your path, and living in accordance with the themes that underlie the structure of the world. And to be honest, we’re all in pretty lousy shape ethically.

Raising the Bar

How do we improve? As with fitness – by surrounding ourselves with people who remind us what the real bar is, people who have made it a point to do better, who have made fitness a way of life. Like prisoners who don’t understand what life is like on the outside, or like employees in a terribly-run company who don’t know any better, we have fallen so far that we don’t even realize how much different life could be if we were only doing it right. We need to remember the standard.

I’ve heard people say that giving up cussing is impossible. I’ve heard people say the same thing about giving up cake, or waking up at five every morning. I imagine if we introduced some of our ancestors to our bathing system, they would find it obsessive and extreme. Yet for us, it’s an unremarkable part of life. It’s our perspective, not our ability, that often limits us.

The Rules vs the Way

There’s plenty more to be said on this subject, but in the space I have left I’ll make one last note. What about cheat days? If fitness and ethics are less about hard-and-fast rules and more about holistic purpose, are there still hard rules to ethics, or can there be ‘cheat days’?

But this would fail to recognize the real seriousness of our ethical malaise. Deliberately breaking ethical rules is less like cheating on your calories and more like deliberately breaking your leg. The fact we can so abuse ourselves and this world on a regular basis does not mean our offenses are trivial; it means our senses are numbed.

Holistic purpose, in fact, requires much more of us than a set of rules ever could, because it encompasses everything. ‘Eating and training’ as an athlete is much more challenging than ‘dieting and exercising’ as a normal person. Why? Because it is no longer a checklist of things to do or avoid; it is an all-encompassing way of life. If you take this way spiritually, it will change everything. But that is part of what makes it wonderful.

“Snatch” by Jamie Jamieson is licensed under CC BY 2.0