Martha Nussbaum on Tragedy

During this week's lectures I was able to reflect upon the real meaning of effort. Sometimes we are so focused on one or many goals that we forget that there are necessary steps to such ends. We live in a society where the things that are easy and quick to gain are the most important things, where obtaining material things is the norm and where when we are better (physically) we are often allowed to thrive and improve. 

I think that people often forget that a person's achievements are a masquerade of the effort and weight, of the long hours writing and researching, and of the friends and family that whose meaningful time was left behind in an effort of achieving the goal. In this case, Martha Nussbaum reminds us that in our path to success we do become fragile, we have to sometimes overcome our own fears in order to really achieve something.

Nussbaum's interpretation of Aristotle's Eudemonia is very clear: Actions are required for success, but there is also a need of sacrifice, of giving out something in exchange for the achievement. This action of sacrifice can lead to failure, for example, going to bed late for Bill Gates in the 70's meant that he could have had health concerns (and he did) but it also meant that one day he was going to create this thing, this company called Microsoft without which I could not have written this blog post.

The acceptance of a degree of failure or a degree of sacrifice gives me a more realistic perspective on the views of success. The kind of thought of "You could fail at no fault of your own" makes me less obsessed with what could go wrong, but more focused of what to do if something actually goes wrong.

In the same way checklists allow many working professionals to assess what they are supposed to do, what they are not doing, and what needs improvement; I think that as students we should always be one step ahead: overseeing any potential roadblock so that our pursuit of happiness and our sacrifice does not lead to failure.

Life as it is is complex and difficult, and it is true that we are not all in our way to Eudemonia but we are at least on our ways to a decent existence. Eating well, exercising, keeping mental clarity should be essential but schools should also go beyond the "care kit" and teach us that success requires certain degree of loss and that we have to be willing to "let go" in order to run faster.