Impairing Our Own Powers – Sunday, July 21, 1957
Last week we talked of the impossibility of being ever altogether on our own for there is no way of endangering ourselves, or doing what we shouldn’t do, without it having its effect on others.
Whatever price is paid, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and others also, share in some degree in the payment of the price.
This suggests a further side of the same subject: as to why people sometimes seem to feel that they have a full right to impair their own lives, or to impair their own powers, or the assumption that it is their life to live, and that what they do shouldn’t concern anyone else. But it has to concern someone else.
When anyone defies the laws of health, for example, and becomes ill, others have to care for him. When anyone defies the laws of safety and is injured, others have to care for him.
No one can hurt himself without hurting others also. Some will challenge this. But what hurts us does hurt others.
Furthermore, we have received so much from others, present and past, that we in turn have an obligation to work, to contribute to the health, to the happiness, to the richness of the world. And if we acquire habits, or do those things, or take unto ourselves that which would impair our own output, that which would impair our own capacity, we are somehow robbing the world of what we owe. And while we may have the freedom to ruin our own lives, we do not have the moral right to ruin them.
An earnest scholar thus pleaded with his pupils: “Never make life smaller” 1-not in any dimension. Don’t destroy but contribute. Don’t impair your own powers or impair the powers or property or possibilities of others.
We owe other men an honest effort, even if only for the privilege of living among them, (even if only for the blessing of not being left in loneliness.) We owe a debt to all pioneers of the past who broke new frontiers, who searched, and found great truths, who defended freedom, and who enriched life—our life.
We owe ourselves, and all others, and God who is the Father of us all, the obligation to try to be at our best—for we all shall be judged by what we do or fail to do with our time and our talents and with all that is ours. And while we may have the freedom to abuse ourselves, we don’t have a real moral right to do so. We have no right to make the world smaller or poorer. We have an obligation—all of us—to try to be at our best.
1Dr. Henry Beston
July 21, 1957
Broadcast Number 1,457