A Personal Rule of Life: Why, How, & What 🤔

be like St. Benedict — everyone's doing it

The entrance to St. Benedict’s monastery in Subiaco, Italy — taken this summer on our pilgrimage

I’ve been talking about Rules of Life for what feels like ages now, but true to how most trends go on the internet, the topic seems to be everywhere now. I call that a good thing. Rules of Life are fantastic.

First off — what aren’t they?

A personal Rule of Life is not a list of goals. But, I’d argue that you should write your Rule of Life before you make anything resembling a list of goals. Since that activity is always a popular one in early January, I thought we’d dust off the topic.

What is a Rule of Life, you ask?

If you’ve hung out with my words and ideas for any length of time you probably already know the answer to this, but it never hurts to review... I define a Rule of Life simply as a commitment to live your life in a particular way. Church mothers and fathers created rules for their communities nearly since the birth of the Church itself, but St. Benedict’s from the sixth century is arguably the most well-known. This document fleshed out the rules for his monastic community (the first recorded one that we know of, by the way), and to this day people still use his framework as a method for writing out what matters most to them.

In short, a Rule of Life is a document that describes the ordinary particulars of your life to help you live congruently with what’s most important to you.

It’s not about everything — whether you should have ham and cheese or PBJ for lunch; what type of car you should buy; whether you should visit family over the holidays or the summer (though a good Rule could help you make those decisions). It’s about the foundational ideas, the core values that help you become more human. Like a ruler, a good Rule of Life is a tool to help you make straight lines in your life: decisions, focuses, and actions that lead to peace as you pursue rhythms that help you flourish.

I’ve written my own Rule of Life for years now, and though different versions have taken different iterations, my Rule has now settled comfortably into an overall document that requires only tweaks here and there as the seasons change. I visit it twice a year: on my August birthday and at the start of the new year.

Here’s my current Rule of Life.