I once made a post about the rules I do my best to live by. Lately, I’ve been thinking of different ways to apply them, some of which are not always readily apparent. So I decided to make a separate post about each rule and explore them individually. For this post, I’ll be focusing on the Golden Rule: “Do to others as you’d have them do to you.”
The Golden Rule has that name for a few good reasons. Firstly, although many people are familiar with it through the Bible, it also appears in several other religions. This suggests a deep universality and wisdom to the rule as it is not limited to just one worldview. Secondly, if everyone followed this rule, there’d be no more conflicts of any type and the world would be filled with peace. Even without going that far, if more people followed the Golden Rule than do now, there’d be much more peace and much less violence. Part of this is because following the rule requires thinking about other people and their feelings instead of solely focusing on oneself. This facilitates understanding which, in turn, opens the door to deeper and more meaningful interactions.
There are some cases in which it doesn’t work, such as self-defense scenarios, but it works perfectly far more often than not. Even if another rule proves to work better in a certain situation, the Golden Rule is still handy early on before the situation unfurls. This rule does so much good in so many different areas of life that, if I had to keep one of my rules and abandon the rest, this would be the one I’d keep. It also works well in conjunction with many other rules and often the combination of two or more of them is stronger than any one of them alone. For all these reasons (and probably many more that I haven’t even considered), the Golden Rule is incredibly powerful and offers much to anyone on either the giving or receiving end of it. I don’t always manage to follow it but when I do, it does me a world of good and paves the way for so much more, and that’s why it’s my first rule.