The Tenth Golden Rule on Living the Good Life

Kindness to others is a good habit that has a lasting effect that supports and reinforces the quest for the good life. Helping others bestows a sense of satisfaction that has two beneficiaries—the beneficiary, the receiver of the help, and the one who provides the help. Over time people who do good deeds develop a friendly and joyful personality that attracts and magnetizes those they associate with and brings kindness their way.

Many of the world’s great religions speak of an obligation to extend kindness to others. But these deeds are often advocated as an investment toward future salvation — as the admission ticket to paradise. That’s not the case for the ancient Greeks, however, who saw kindness through the lens of reason, emphasizing the positive effects acts of kindness have not just on the receiver of kindness but to the giver of kindness as well, not for the salvation of the soul in the afterlife, but in this life. Simply put, kindness tends to return to those who do kind deeds, as Aesop demonstrated in his colourful fable of a little mouse cutting the net to free the big lion. Aesop lived in the 6^th century B.C. and acquired a great reputation in antiquity for the instruction he offered in his delightful tales. Despite the passage of many centuries, Aesop’s counsels have stood the test of time because in truth, they are timeless observations on the human condition; as relevant and meaningful today as they were 2,500 years ago.
As it so happens, the ancient Greeks were not as “idealistic” as they are sometimes portrayed as being. Even the great philosophers and poets among them were strongly inclined toward utility in many of their teachings –including the notion of good deeds. The idea of an act of kindness as an end in itself or as a matter of personal duty was simply not part of their moral horizon. At the same time, however, their sense of utility in such matters was not crass or tactless. For Aesop an act of kindness is not a calculation; it is not a conscious investment made in the hope of attaining a dividend. What he suggests, instead, is that beneficence tends to return to those who do good deeds — a kind of karmic recompense. And so in the fable mentioned above, when the lion is hopelessly ensnared in a net, it is the lowly mouse the lion once spared, that nibbles through the ropes and sets him free. A spontaneous good deed reciprocated under circumstances no one could have anticipated.