Living the good life is about enjoying the pleasures of life, but it is not about pleasure only. It is more reality based than hedonism. Thus, it is also about meeting the challenges of life rationally and successfully, and about finding--or perhaps more correctly, creating meaning. It is endeavoring to fulfill all our human longings, not just the longing for pleasure, and all our human capabilities. Chief among these capabilities is the capacity for compassion.

We are social beings. The human species has survived and continues to survive the culling hand of natural selection primarily by intelligence, and a remarkable capacity to adapt. Our survival, however, is not by these alone. Our capacity to form strong cooperative social bonds is equally to credit for our success at being fruitful and multiplying. Compassion, one expression of our social nature, plays a major role, in survival, and in living the good life.

Compassion is the ability to understand how another feels along with the desire to relieve suffering (or at least, to not cause it). Note that both understanding, and the desire to relieve suffering are important. Good intentions without understanding may be self-gratifying, but leads to nowhere. Understanding with evil intent defines the craft of the con man.

True compassion is not to be confused with altruism or self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is a myth. Often it is a kind of delayed gratification, a quid pro quo with the future, or with God. In other cases it is a form of self aggrandizement; proving ourselves right, or righteous, regardless of the cost. As one wit quipped, "I'm perfectly willing to be self-sacrificing , as long as I get something out of it."

There's nothing wrong with delaying gratification. It is in fact, one the of the most valuable skills one needs in order to truly live the good life. While true compassion requires that we suspend our expectation of a reward, it does not require that we "give of ourselves" for a reward in Heaven, or good Karma in the next life, or a place in the World to Come. There's no need to delay gratification for something that will most likely never happen. Sometimes the only thing we get out of compassion is the knowledge of having done good for another. As social beings we can enjoy this. Sometimes compassion has other rewards as well.

Everyday there are opportunities for compassion. Simple acts of random kindness. Doing good just because it makes one feel good. As a popular bumpersticker in Hawaii proclaims, "Live Aloha". Enjoy living a life of aloha, a life of compassion. If doing good benefits you, enjoy that as well. Don't, however, make compassion a medium of exchange. It is not intended as a way to satisfy the human longing for pleasure. It is a way of fullfilling all of one's human longings and capabilites. It gives meaning to life. It is a way of living the good life now. What act of compassion have you done today?