Eudaemonia By Jamie Kirkpatrick

For more than twenty years, I worked in an all-boys high school as a college counselor, teacher (Middle Eastern Studies) and coach (baseball). I’m still engaged in education as a resource to students who are sorting their way through the college admissions process, primarily as a reader and editor of their college essays. One thing I’ve learned: one of a teacher’s greatest joys comes when the student becomes the teacher and the teacher becomes the student. It happened (again) just yesterday morning…

I was reading a series of short answers—responses could not be longer than thirteen words!—to questions posed by the admissions office of a well-regarded university in upstate New York. The prompt in question was “I am fascinated by:”. My student’s response was “the world, different cultures, peoples, ideas, nature, literature, and eudaemonia.” I was stumped; what in the world was ‘eudaemonia?’

Thank you,Google. Eudaemonia comes down to us from the Greek. It means ‘good spirited’ or ‘well-being,’ and is often translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing.’ But ‘happiness’ is an emotion whereas ‘eudaemonia’ is more; it is a state of mind, an Aristotelian ideal representing a good life, one lived in accordance with harmony and reason by cultivating virtue. By contrast, its antonym runs the gamut from despair and misery to adversity, suffering, and defeat. I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of people suffering unimaginable loss in Los Angeles.

You may recall that in last week’s Musing, I mentioned that on the day after my wife and I returned from several days atop a mountain in Montana, I experienced a strange sense of health and well-being. I attributed this to all the red blood cells circulating in my system after a week at elevation. Alas, it was but a temporary mood shift, but it lasted just long enough to make me appreciate the difference between life at sea level and life in the wake of the thinner atmosphere of the mountains. It was more than a mood; it was a moment (I now know) of eudaemonia.

We are about to embark on a new era, a time that may well test our national soul. Try as I might, I cannot shake the sense of foreboding that hangs over me like thick fog these days. Eudaemonia seems impossibly far away. All the current talk about expanding American power seems the very antithesis of cultivating eudaemonia in our lives. I can feel Aristotle shuddering.

I think a lot about how to get through the dark days ahead, but I honestly haven’t come up with any reasonable answers. Some people say “don’t worry, maybe it won’t be so bad,” but check the facts; experience suggests otherwise. And when I hear all the bombastic posturing about Greenland or the Panama Canal or even Canada, that fleeting experience of eudaemonia I had post-Montana seems all the more dreamlike, more remote, farther and farther away.

Eudaemonia is a difficult concept to define, but there are several common elements in any attempt at translation: growth. authenticity, meaning, bliss, and excellence. I sincerely hope that my young student who will soon be heading off to college in search of “the world, different cultures, peoples, ideas, nature, literature, and eudaemonia” will not be disappointed. We owe his generation more.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His most recent novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available in bookstores and on Amazon.