How to be a good person - a recipe for disaster.
Does anyone really know? Who is the decider of this mysterious recipe? This way of the world. The way one must be in order to be perceived as the righteous good?
I think my teachers must have known. The elders, they definitely knew. The ones who told us what to do and taught us what we know — if anyone knew, it must be them.
What is a good person? I do believe I have met quite a few. They come in all shapes and sizes, labels and identities, with many thoughts and opinions — oh but except for some thoughts! Certain thoughts will certainly bar you from being accepted into the Good Person Club.
Which thoughts are prohibited? Someone, please tell me, I’d like to know. I need to know because I need to be a good person. I need to know that others know that I am good and positive and hold the essence of all that is okay. If I am not good, what am I doing? What am I? WHO am I?
If I were to make the rules (which, let it be known, I do not like rules), I would say that any person who hugs their loved ones goodnight and kisses their partner adieu is pretty good. But what if they have done something strange 2 years ago? What if they voted for the man who shall not be named and supported that chicken restaurant? Well in that case we must certainly revoke their membership to the Good Person Club. We shall have none of those types around here!
I’m not sure we’ll retain many members if we keep sifting through peoples’ past to ensure their goodness. But if we do not judge their past, how do we know if they are good?!
Perhaps it is in the intangible. Maybe it is the strength quotient of how tightly they hug the ones they love? Maybe it is how genuine their smile is to a passerby? Has anyone invited a legitimate detector of pure intentions? That might be something we need.
Or maybe none of it matters? Maybe what we perceive to be right and wrong, good or bad, are just illusions? We all end up in the same place, don’t we? The Creator does not even care if you are good or bad! He views it all the same because are we not all one? Is there not a need for balance?
My friend, Alan Watts, taught me that life implies death and death implies life. Night implies day and day exists because of night. There’s no up without down, sour without sweet. It all exists in harmony, doesn’t it?
Well, that approach certainly won’t work for our club! There must be rules. There must be a way to determine who gets in and who does not. If a man named God gets to deny entrance to heaven, there must be a way we can keep track of things while here on Earth. If there are no rules, we cannot keep tabs on the people, and oh… these people, they must be tabbed!!
Perhaps it is that we are obsessed with order and we have not let ourselves simmer in the chaos. After all, chaos must imply order, and the same is true of the reverse. We’ve been living in order for far too long. The masculine has had control and that has resulted in quite an interesting societal dynamic, hasn’t it?
Creating a balance would suggest that chaos is good. Chaos may be necessary for order to exist. And in every human, there lives a bit of chaos among the order — or so we are told. Perhaps it really is all just chaos and the human mind is responsible for creating a perception of order…
AHA! There’s a chance I have just cracked the code. You can mail my award to the nearest tropical beach. I’ll collect it once I’ve figured out the recipe for a good person.
You see, I’m genuinely not so sure about what makes a good person. It seems to change every decade, every week, every lunar cycle. When I was younger, my father taught me to stand up for what I believe in, even if I’m the only one standing — yet, today the world tells me to fall in line and do as I’m told. That is quite puzzling.
My parents may have also said “do as you’re told!” when I was young enough to count my age on one hand, but today I am relieved to say that they show pride for my troublemaking, chaos-stirring behaviors in the pursuit of doing what is right and doing very much the opposite of what I am told.
How then, do we decipher the good from the bad? A stranger on Twitter calls people criminals for saying what they think and Martin Luther King Jr. says we have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Conflicting instructions, I suppose.
If a balance is required for all things to carry on, then who really cares if someone is good or bad? Don’t we need both? If it were not for my high school and college trauma of being left out, made fun of, and talked about behind my back, I certainly would not be the fiery-tongued, free soul that I am today! It seems I needed the “bad” to happen to me — to happen for me.
In some strange way, it might be better to have it all, what they call the good, the bad, and the ugly. Have you ever noticed that it’s 2 to 1 on the bad vs good balance there? If ugliness is subjective then perhaps there’s a balance after all.
I believe that if you live your whole life trying to be a good person, you’re less likely to achieve this goal than a bird is at trying to speak English properly — you’ll make a lot of noises, some people will think it sounds wonderful, and others will go to great lengths trying to get rid of your annoying presence.
If you try to be a good person, you’ll ask so many people what they think that you may morph into a soup made of whatever is leftover in the fridge.
If you try to be a good person, you might spend $4,567 on books until your hands are full of paper cuts and your brain is packed to the brim with a million words that are not your own.
If you try to be a good person, you’ll probably give more hugs than the average and your grandmother would really appreciate that about you.
If you try to be a good person, the sun will still rise in the east and set in the west, but you’ll probably enjoy it more on the west coast because everyone says the sunsets are the best here!!
If you try to be a good person, you might wake up at 6am every day and then be grumpy by 2pm because Jocko Willink says discipline is the key but, what the hell, I’m tired!
If you try to be a good person, you’ll have 43K followers on Instagram and you’ll decline all your mom’s calls because you’re too busy managing your corner of the internet.
And if you are a good person, you’ll stop trying to show everyone how good you are and instead focus on being the good that you feel you are.
If you are a good person, you might let go of the status quo and choose the path that is best for you because it makes you happy.
If you are a good person, you can say what you think about Britney Spears and your friends will probably still love you even if you think she looked better with a shaved head.
If you are a good person, you’ll make other people uncomfortable when they witness your honesty and authenticity because it’s really weird when someone just says what they think and acts in accordance with their desires. Ew!
If you are a good person, you might wake up with the sun and make a cup of hot tea and sit in silence, pondering the expansion of the universe — but you won’t make much money doing that.
And most importantly, if you’re a good person, you probably won’t spend much time proving it to others because you’ll know that it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. Because the only person around when it’s late at night
and you’re staring at the ceiling
and the dryer is humming away
and all the birds have gone to sleep
and the time difference means your boyfriend is already in dreamland
and the sheets are your only friend,
the only person around is just you.
It’s just you. And your phone is in the living room, so really, it’s just you.
If you were the last human being on the planet — who then would decide if you are good or bad? Perhaps some man in the sky. Perhaps Ra, who tells us about the Creator. Perhaps your lingering beliefs from the time when there were 7 billion other souls sharing this tiny blue dot with you.
Maybe no one, not even you, knows if you are good.
And maybe, that is okay.