On Goodness and Leaving the Isle of the Blessed
“One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day. And in this way, one day or a short time does not make someone blessed and happy either.” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.7
Aristotle’s argument that true flourishing requires more than good character—it requires “proper equipment.” Health. Wealth. Goodly children. And it seems that somewhere across the centuries, people began treating blessed as the goal rather than good, until the trappings of a certain kind of happiness came to stand in for virtue itself as the mark of a well-lived life.
The trouble, of course, is that the equipment is not fully ours to control. What is needed to be good, however, is.
And so, we return to the question we left hanging: why do you need to feel happy in order to be good?
I have always been a light sleeper.
I have been the proud owner of insomnia that predates the medical alarms by decades. In the years before my daughter, the silence of the night was a void I often filled with thought; now, the silence is a physical weight, a pressurized chamber. I lie awake at some unfathomable hour. Is it 11:00 PM or 3:00 AM? Does it matter? At this altitude, the distinction loses its utility. Time is no longer a sequence of events but a flat, humming plane.
The house breathes through machines. There is the brown noise machine, churning out a static sea to negotiate an uneasy peace with the oxygen concentrator’s mechanical inhalation. Every few seconds, the ventilator interrupts with its rhythmic, insistent sigh, just dropping in a synthetic reminder of a life being sustained by a collective of wires and software. I hear these things, but they don’t break the silence. They create the kind of silence that makes your head ache, like the physical sensation of ears failing to pop as you climb into a thinning atmosphere. You are higher up than you were ever meant to be, and the old thick, easy oxygen of a “normal” life is gone.
And in that ear-splitting silence, the unluckiest series of events takes our night to the places it so often goes. The smart speaker playing the brown noise decides to update. The break in the droning is just enough to make her hold her breath for a split second too long, which sets off the pulse-ox alarm. This wakes her with a start. Which triggers a seizure.
Phone out and timing. Now all the alarms are screaming. The seizure won’t stop. Rescue meds administered. Phone now ready to call 911. The rescue meds finally take hold of her, and she settles. And in the middle of this chaos, the speaker emits a cheery ding! Update complete. Brown noise resumes.
We need to talk about the word unlucky.
In the culture of caregiving, we are often coached to avoid this word. We are told to speak of “challenges,” “journeys,” or “special blessings.” We are encouraged to view our circumstances as a bespoke curriculum designed by the universe to refine our souls. But to look at my daughter’s room, or to look at her when her body is a site of systemic failure, and call it a “blessing” is a lie that insults her reality.
We are, quite simply, profoundly unlucky. Luck is the name we give to the vast architecture of events that influence our lives but remain entirely outside our control. It is the genetic lottery and the random mutation, yes, but it is also the granular friction of the day-to-day: a suction tube getting impossibly caught on the corner of the couch when you are hurried, or receiving an entire box of diapers with the side tabs missing. When these events settle into the foundation of your life, they create a ruinous horizon. I look toward the future, and I do not see the milestones of graduation or the bright, messy independence of a growing child. I see the vacation photos that will never be taken. I see milestones that have hardened into millstones. These heavy, immovable facts that we must carry until one day we will bury them in the earth with her.
By the time the sun actually rises, the adrenaline of the 3:00 AM seizure has curdled into a pungent, salt-rimmed exhaustion. We had recently had a long-term EEG day, and this morning’s requirement is a gentle tedious labor: washing the glue out of her hair. As luck would have it, she didn’t have any meaningful events while she was hooked up to the monitors so the task of having to excise glue from her tender scalp seems unnecessarily cruel.
There is a specific, grey adhesive used to bind electrodes to a child’s scalp, designed to withstand the thrashing of a brain on fire. It is stubborn. It smells of solvent. As we work the adhesive remover into her hair, the sensory contrast is jarring. My fingers, calloused by the small, repetitive tasks of maintenance, feel the startling warmth of her scalp. Beneath the chemical smell of the glue that milk-warm, floral-earthy smell that is uniquely hers hits my nose.
In these moments, she is often limp. The seizures and the medications have hollowed out her muscle tone, and she crumples into us. There is a terrifying beauty in that crumple. It is a manifestation of absolute trust, a weight that says, I cannot hold myself up, so you must. We are devoted to this weight; we take it up willingly, but it is not “joy.” It is not amusing or light.
The world tells us that to be “good” parents, we must be “happy” parents. We are sold a version of virtue that is inseparable from a sunny disposition. Indeed, it seems that people would have you be happy and not good, rather than be good and unhappy. We are told that if we just “choose” enough gratitude, we can achieve a state of perfect contentment despite the ruins. To the outside observer, my wife and I standing over the sink might even look “inspiring.” People love that word; it makes them feel better about the fact that they aren’t the ones holding the washcloth. It is so important that we be happy that whole industries have popped up around it. Retreats promising to revitalize you, respite for date nights so you can find that spark of happiness again, mantras of ‘take the trip’ or ‘do the thing’ all with the design to get you happy again so you can get back to doing the hard work of parenting, or caregiving, or parent-caregiving as the case may be.
For many, this is just what they need. The break to fill their own cup lets them pour their goodness back into their child’s care. Others deem it impossible to provide the care demanded of them unless they also have these happy moments provided for them as well. This is not an indictment of those who ‘take the trip’ or go on retreats. This is not a nihilistic rant against people being happy, and I’m not saying being this kind of happy isn’t at times helpful. But the mindset that you are owed happiness or even that you have earned it through your actions begs the question: Why hang your goodness on the hook of happiness? Why must you need these moments of pleasure in order to be good in the pain?
Happiness, in the modern sense, is a fickle emotion, sometimes reduced to a chemical reaction to favorable circumstances. It’s hard to imagine a happy person who never smiles. But if you require that feeling in order to be a “good” person, what happens when the circumstances are objectively terrible? What happens when the “unluck” is permanent? Would you dare to be good even if you knew it would mean you’d never be happy, in the emotional sense, again?
I have over the years come to believe that one of the most radical acts of care is to decouple the two. We can acknowledge that our lives are in ruins. We can admit to being fundamentally unhappy. And yet, in that thinning air, we can choose to be deeply, radically good. The “Good” person does good things—like scrubbing grey glue from a tired child’s head—not because it provides a “special” joy or for some reward, but for the sheer, deep, cognitive and spiritual devotion to the things that matter most, because they are the right things to do. We do not do it because we are “happy” to do it. We do it because she is here, and she is ours, and she is worth the exhaustion.
This is a multi-part exploration of life on the far side of the thinning air of the (un)Blessed. This is a place where the old, easy oxygen has run out, but where a different, breathtaking view of the human spirit becomes visible.
I am writing this not as a possessor of some immutable truth. The philosophy I’m exploring here is an experiment, more like a framework I’m “trying on” to see how it fits against the jagged edges of my daily life. I write with the conviction that survival often requires, but I am well aware that these ideas are contested and fragile. I may find I need a different set of tools after the next crisis.
Next time we’ll step away from the sink and the solvent-smelling rituals to look at the “Why” we tell ourselves and why the search for a reason might be the very thing keeping us from finding our footing in the ruins. We’ll look at the view from the peaks, and why the “unlucky” are the only ones who ever get to see it.
Until next time, stay safe, stay kind, and know that you are appreciated.
Cheers,
[kartoffelvater]
Thank you for reading. For those of you coming back, or for finding your way here for the first time—I’m so glad you’re here. We wouldn’t be here without you. Every bit of support helps and we appreciate it more than words can say!
Our Little Kartoffel 
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