Ethos Series: A Character Emerges
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This is part of a series on defining an Ethos for yourself, using me as an example. If you want to see the roadmap for this, or jump to a different section, then head back to the series introduction.
From Text to Flesh
Didn’t We Already Do Virtues?
Yes. And virtues are one of the top-level outputs for this process. But they are still just words on a page. To be able to live the virtues, they need to come to life.
It would be nice if we could just decide ‘these are my virtues’ and instantly embody them. But we can’t. We aren’t that person yet. What we can do is define who that person is. Here we will imagine a character that possesses all that we hope to, and through visualizing and even conversing with them we can begin to move ourselves toward that eventual end.
The goal here is a short (probably quippy) bio. And since we are talking about eulogy virtues, we can extend that framing here. I’ll call this part of the process finished when I can answer:
How will my close friends and family describe me once I've passed on?
Back to the 6 virtues. Together this is how they stack up:
Loving
Vivacious
Authentic
Optimistic
Impactful
Enduring
Even as a short list, that’s a lot to remember. Or to fit into one sentence per my goal at the top. And it’s a couple too many vowels to condense into a neat acronym. I could stretch to THRIVE, but I lose some of the important meaning along the way.
So lets go for another round of compression and see what comes out1.
As I said above, the virtue I aspire to the most is (good) optimism. Most of that is due to the dualism, and my current benchmark on the wrong side of the split. Loving and alive (vivacious) are actually the most important ones. Luckily I can group all 3 with a twist on the rose-colored optimism I desire.
Rosy, as a worldview and a rich vibrant pink, can hold them all in a 4-letter nibble2. I can see objective beauty like a rose, and the good at the heart of everyone and every moment, while grounding myself in vulnerability and the love of those around me. Pink can be reminiscent of the active brawn and unfettered brain that I hope to keep for decades to come.
Much like with vivacious, I get to keep the colorful and animated presence. And being Ros-y instead of Rose, it points to a partial quality, rose-ish, that can vary and bend with need. That lets me mentally incorporate more subwants that might be a stretch for any other unifying term (i.e. grateful…like delivering roses, concentrated experience…like thick Pepto Bismol).
The remaining 3: authentic, impactful, and enduring, come together with a little whimsy3 in the sage-like embodiment of a Whizzard.
Whizzing was something I defined on a whim, and in that moment, recursively dogfooded it into existence. It lives on tongue-in-cheek, so I don’t want it as an explicit virtue. The flakey swoop-in-swoop-out nature kind of runs against the idea of ‘virtues’ as a whole. But it can be a part of my identity, and carry the real virtues with it.
Whizzing becomes Whizzard to give it character and provide the scaffolding to hold the more desirable virtues.
Impactful comes through the magic, more powerful than any earthly means.
Authenticity is a staple of wizards, they dress however they want and always seem to speak the truth4.
Wizards endure by way of their magic, or just their usefulness. They are almost always some old guy5 hanging around to share their sagely wisdom with the protagonist before passing on into…whatever comes next. And hopefully getting a fine eulogy for their troubles.
And look, it even works beautifully as an emoji mashup:
Eulogy of a Rosy Whizzard
Back to where we started:
How will my close friends and family describe me once I've passed on?
I won’t get the chance to actually eulogize myself. If I did I would probably ramble on like I am right now. But I think this framing lets me imagine the end state and take an external view on the person I hope to become.
So when I am left as only a memory, I hope my friends and family will say: He really was a Rosy Whizzard, optimistically speedrunning through life so that he could always make time for the people that mattered. And he managed to touch the hearts and minds of remarkably many people along the way.
Can Eulogies Have Epilogues?
In the week(s) ahead I will extrapolate my Virtues into Principles, ‘How’ guidelines for living my best life. Then after a bit of cleanup and prioritization of those, I’ll move on to redefining the Problems I’m centering my life around as a (future) Rosy Whizzard. These will be my guiding achievements to unlock. The ‘Whats’ to my virtuous ‘Whys’ and the third leg of my ethos.
It's kind of weird to leave this in when I already know the answer
From the software term for 4-bits, but also because Rosy as a word isn’t a mouthful
Hat-tipped by the double zz, an extra for the one that really should exist in a word like whimsical
We even have a different word for the evil warlock, so wizards are clearly the good guys
Dumbledore, Gandalf, 3-Eyed Raven, plus Obi Wan and Yoda if you squint