Another Choice

Human first

Each of us, whether of this kind or another, of this age or another, is engaged in a particular context with its net of relationships, duties and responsibilities, with its possibilities of expression, its rigors and privations, its advantages and its questions – and with its habits, which also serve in communicating a mutual assurance between all concerned.

We are linked and bound to one another, even if we often forget the living sense of this solidarity – even if, too often, we behave as if we were foreign to one another.

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The great majority of the contemporary contexts remain indifferent to any sort of inner life: it is a matter of each one’s honesty to give oneself without cheating to the exigencies of human existence “such as it is” wherever one is. It is generally considered that any “inner life” is only good for the rich and idle, or else for those who enter religious life – who in some way are sacrificing themselves so as to contribute to the upkeep and preservation of one faith or another and of its message of hope and moral conduct. Any attempt to live another way within an existing society and to seek new forms for a new comprehension of the world and of the reason of our existence is most often deemed suspect, a pretext of a façade for exalted madcaps who tell themselves high tales and lack the courage to face “reality”. And indeed how, by which privilege or which superior right should one be exempted from the worries, chores and burdens, the uncertainty and precariousness that everyone else must bear even while trying to contribute one’s best to the harmony and welfare of one’s own and of the whole society – and one’s harvest of the little simple joys and ordinary pleasures of daily life?

Is there not in this reasoning of the crowd a great truth?

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