Feeling Better vs. Feeling Good

If life were all about feeling good as long and as often as possible, we'd have it easy. There's no question that when the operating instruction is to make yourself feel good, the focus is on oneself first and always. Just keep looking out for number one.

Feeling good, really good, happens when the stars are all aligned and we encounter brief moments of victory, sometimes the weighty presence of a positive---we just got a raise and we can now take a real vacation, or the simple absence of a negative---it's Saturday and the phone isn't ringing and we can sleep in.

But in the gray area of character and ethics and clean living, we often have to settle for feeling better (about ourselves) over feeling good (about the whole situation). Sometimes righting a wrong means moving oneself into a clear conscience, but leaving another person hurt or confused, angry or even violent.

There is wisdom to the advice of "choose your battles", but sooner or later when someone close to us pushes the issue too close to the edge of the cliff, the right thing to do is to let that person fall over and feel the bruises and break the bones. If it's someone important to us, it hurts us as well as them. We feel better, but we don't feel good.

That's what character development is: the gray choices we have to make throughout our lives. We may spend most of our days not feeling so good. But we can sleep at night.