Should You Make Your Own Commandments?

Most of us know the ten commandments. The seven deadly sins push the idea even further: pride, greed, envy, lust, sloth, gluttony, wrath. Both are lists of rules. But here's a different question. Have you ever sat down and written standards for yourself, the way you so readily write them for everyone around you?

Setting rules for other people comes naturally. Our own? Much harder. If you want to find the ones you've quietly handed to others, pay attention to what makes you angry, what strikes you as unfair, or what you keep wishing people would just do. Somewhere underneath, you already know that if they did it, your life would run a little smoother.

In the study of moral development, inventing standards for yourself and holding yourself to them shows up late, not early. You can spot the roots of some of those standards in the things you tell yourself you 'should' do. Plenty of those shoulds were planted by other people, usually with a dose of guilt attached. So how do you take them and actually make them yours?

Introspection, mostly. When someone does something you dislike, stop and ask whether you'd consider it fine for yourself to do the same thing. The things we judge in others tend to point straight at what we're afraid might be judged in us. They also mark the places where we could reasonably expect more from ourselves, the standards worth adopting.

Could you stand as an example for someone else? And if you're going to measure other people by a standard, doesn't fairness say you measure yourself by the identical one? Maybe the better move is to go clean up the mess in your own yard before you start listing complaints about the neighbor's.

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