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?

Oh My Goodness!--A Paragraph a Day

Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are.
To be good is the great thing.    -Edwin Hubbell Chapin

I think that pretty much all of us want to be good at some level, but that some people just aren't very good at being good.  They've become hardened, or afraid, or unsure of themselves, and they put on a hard front to try to impress other people or to make themselves feel stronger than they actually are.  This isn't necessarily their fault, of course--the ways that people act come from a whole bunch of different influences, and people have learned coping strategies from all sorts of different people in all sorts of different ways.  Personally, I would love to think that I'm a "good" person, whatever that means.  I would like to be good to others, someone who helps rather than hurts, someone who gives more than I take.  I don't know if I achieve this or not, but I do try, even if I'm not always focused on trying to be good or on trying to do the good thing in any given situation.  But I think that Edwin makes an extremely important point above--while my focus on being good is usually on what I'm doing to and for others, my efforts may be better directed towards making myself good in my heart, in my core.  If I can do that, of course, then whatever I do will simply be good because it comes from a good source.  And that would be very, very good, wouldn't it?