What Is Good?--A Paragraph a Day

I often wonder what's truly good and what isn't.  There really is no clear answer, of course, because so many things that seem to be bad end up being the best things for us, and so many things that seem to be good turn out to be awful in the long run.  So I've stopped taking things at their surface--I don't necessarily believe that something that looks good to me truly IS good, because I really don't know.  I may win a million dollars in a lottery and end up being miserable; I may lose a job and end up finding something much better in all ways.  I think that it's far too easy to judge things on first impressions, and that true goodness rarely shows itself immediately.  We have to understand things on a much deeper level before we can truly know whether something is good or bad (with a few exceptions, of course).  I'm sure that most of us have had the experience of watching someone do something very good, only to find out later that they were doing it for selfish reasons and that the action wasn't at all good after all.  I think that the only thing that I can do with any surety is to make sure that my own actions come from that place inside of me that wants to do good, for only I know my true intentions.  And any goodness that I can put into the world is going to add to the overall goodness--and that can't be a bad thing, can it?