Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Still vital and important new things to be learned. You can’t just be stable, and secure and unchanging, because there are Rule #12 Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. Rule #11 Do not bother children when they are skateboarding. Rule #9 Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t. Rule #8 Tell the truth-or, at least, don’t lie. Rule #7 Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Rule #6 Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Rule #5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Rule #4 Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Rule #3 Make friends with people who want the best for you. Rule #2 Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Rule #1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back. It’s there we find the meaning that justifies life and its inevitable suffering.” That’s where we are simultaneously stable enough, exploring enough, transforming enough, repairing enough, and cooperating enough. ‘There’ is the dividing line between order and chaos. Each of the twelve rules of this book-and their accompanying essays-therefore provide a guide to being there. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown-and that is also not good. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require rules, standards, values-alone and together. It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons. Rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. “It took time to settle on a title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish.” ~ Jordan B. I hope that these rules and their accompanying essays will help people understand what they already know: that the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life. I’m simply offering the best I can manage. I am not for a moment claiming, however, that I am entirely correct or complete in my thinking.īeing is far more complicated than one person can know, and I don’t have the whole story.
I have built up a large corpus of stories and concepts pertaining to them. I have been thinking and lecturing about such ideas for decades. It’s asking for everything.īut the alternative-the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless individual-is clearly worse. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons our world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. “How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other?
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