WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE? (3rd Position)

By Fidelis Favour Chiamaka

Oscar Wilde said, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future”. A person living a bad life has the tendency of living a good life depending on his or her personal opinion about life. For a person to live a good life, it does not only involve the spiritual or reglious aspect, it involves the physical, social, academic aspect of an individual’s life.

What it means to live a good life is for an individual to know the right thing to do and he is doing it irrespective of situations that might arise as consequences. An individual might not smoke, drink, gossip, judge others but he or she might have a friend who does and he is quiet apart the situation not telling his friend about it. Is that living a good a life? There’s a difference between judging someone and telling the person the truth. To live a good life requires one to say A is A and B is B.

To live a good life is not all about going to the church or the mosque regularly. No one is saying that being a good Christian or Muslim is wrong. One’s spiritual aspect of life might be good but he or she is also failing in other aspects of life. In the physical aspect of life, how is the individual’s environment? Will an individual living a good life see litter and dispose it or will he add to it and make the environment more dirty? As an individual living a good life, how is the person’s health? Are exercises important to the individual?

An individual who is likely to forgive and forget is living a good life compared to someone who will only add fire to anything that can burn. A student with a conscience to read and prepare for exams is living a good life compared to one who will forget and party away time. What it means to live a good life is not doing good things for people to see but also doing them genuinely where no one can see you. To live a good life is to be a good person, being a good person opens doors of opportunities.

Teachers can only teach, preachers can only preach and writers can only write but no matter what a writer writes, “He can never re-write the book of revelation”. Only an individual can tell what it means to live a good life, it’s personal. The only advice a concerned person can give is to do the right thing and be a good person.