Beautiful Human

What is it to be a good person and all that entails?

Just what exactly is it that makes a person, a good person?

 

Is it intention? The desire to carry out that which is”good”?

No. This is something that has different meanings to different people, and the intentions behind that individual desire often belie an agenda that has ultimately selfish objectives propping it up.

Even as people strive to help other people they are looking for some sort of self absolution, some sort of inner recognition that makes them perceivably good.

More malignant even than this, some who help others particularly in grandiose ways are doing so in order to atone for the evils they have wrought that remain hidden and deeply held within their heart.

Within the media of recent times we have seen numerous examples of this which I need not touch upon here.

 

Is to be good then, to be honest?

To speak openly and without secrecy upon all matters of life?

No. To do so would be ill advised, irresponsible, at times destructive, cruel in some respects.

The capacity to lie is a basic and essential human trait that sits within the capability of every one of us, however sainted and honest some may claim to be. Were we to live entirely honest lives then I believe we would live in a world wrought with horror, we would all be terrified to discover that the society of which we are so proud or at least once were is replete with monsters with indescribable thoughts and objectives.

 

An ideal then, devotion to a code, a methodical manner of being, a way of life awash with morality and the supposed “greater good” in  mind. Is this the answer….?

Honestly? I mean it sounds so right doesn’t it? It sounds so true and simple.

No. I don’t think it is the answer, if that’s the answer then the answer is simply far too simple.

To be this, to be a living breathing paragon of concern for your fellow man of virtue and value and valor….

Well, in the end what is that? That’s preaching. To be the above you are but a preacher, and a preacher has again an agenda. That agenda is to make all as they are, and even if “as they are” is supposedly good and righteous this can still only translate in its most dissected permutation to a dislike for the unlike.

There is a word which describes a dislike for the unlike and all that it entails and that word is prejudice.

To preach unto other and to tell them how they should live, should behave, should think is only to be prejudice in the truest sense, however “well intentioned” it may supposedly be.

 

A bleak picture begins to swim into solidity here.

We still haven’t managed to answer this question we have sitting before us.

A good person, what is it that makes one? What defines or creates one?

 

It’s like any question in life, any “big question” worth asking or considering at least.

There isn’t an easy answer, there isn’t a definitive answer and there isn’t only one answer.

 

We are all flawed, we are all aspects of being which have both colour and darkness to them, both nobility and callousness, both charity and greed. We all try to do the right thing, everyone one us both civilized and base are trying to do what in our terms would be the right thing. There isn’t a manual, or a rulebook, or a guideline that can act as step by step description of how life ought to be lived.

No one person can tell you that you’re right or wrong in the objectives you’ve selected and the motivations that drive them. Why?  Because we are all different people.

 

For some people, life is simple.

You’re born, you go to school and learn as much as you can, you meet someone and do your best day upon day to make them as happy as you can. You build a life, you gather money and possessions and resources and you hide in the artifice of supposed grown up life. Then you have kids, and you inflict the same process upon them, you replicate what your experience has been and sometimes it takes and sometimes it doesn’t.

To many, perhaps even the majority of a certain generation, this is a life lived the right way.

A life lived in the pursuit of love, money, reproduction, work, child rearing, retirement and relaxation.

A safe life, a life that seems to tick all of the pre-planned boxes, a neat life, a tidy life.

A good life? I don’t know, that’s up to you.

 

 

 

For other people, it’s anything but simple.

In older days the previous paragraph was almost always how the journey of life would progress, probably with very few exceptions.

In more recent times the world has become a far more complicated place and so the people living within it have followed suit. Free will is more commonplace, the ability to live a life outside of any box or any plan, the ability to be a spontaneous and supposedly “free” person.

A mixed blessing is what I what I would call this brave new generation.

I think that the old formula still exists, and in some scattered way partially through following an example, partially perhaps through some sort of race memory mentality, people still attempt to follow it.

They still want someone to love, they still want someone to make happy and perhaps more truthfully and honestly someone to make them happy. They still reproduce, they still get money via some means, often less than industrious means these days… However, with freedom comes maneuverability and with that, at least in a sense you have a reduced stability.

Relationships are made and unmade all of the time. Promises have less value and commitment is almost non-existent at this point alas. The complicated generation for that is what we’ll them is an entirely mixed bag of non-conformity and abstract life plans. They aren’t evil, they aren’t good, they’re doing the best they can. Which for some means doing nothing at all, for others means doing whatever makes them happy regardless of the effect it takes upon the lives of those around them, and for some means achieving as much status and material gain as humanly possible.

 

What makes a good person?

I’m not sure I know, I’m not sure anyone knows or even sure if such a thing solidly exists.

 

So what are we left with? Where do we go?

There’s nowhere else to go, all we can come back to is what we do know, or at least what you know.

As in what you know about yourself.

Only you know who you are, only you know what your true goals are, your true limitations and definitions of value. All we can do with that is whatever we think is right.

I don’t think anyone is truly evil or truly good. I think history and the present world around us prove the existence of both in the hand of mankind.

Sometimes good motivation leads to perceivably “evil” behavior and sometimes supposedly “evil” motivations lead to good results in bringing others together in recognition of that which is terrible.

 

We can only take the walk of life one step at a time, and we are all on a different path and all of those individual paths are going in different and ever altering directions.

I think that you just have to take every step one thought at a time.

 

We’ll have selfish days, we’ll have giving days, we’ll have loving days and sometimes we’ll have hateful days.

Some days we’ll succeed and we’ll show ourselves inner beauty of which we almost would have dreamed ourselves incapable. Other days we might let ourselves down, we might hurt other s and do things of which we aren’t proud, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not.

Because do you know what we are? What we all really are?

We are a work in progress, a collective work in progress.

 Learning lessons, gaining merits and losing delusions, even as we create new ones to replace them.

 

We will never be perfect.

We will never be entirely noble or entirely good.

However, as long as we are trying, as long as we continue and never ever stop trying to be the best that we are capable of becoming, then that’s good enough for me.

 

In the end, I don’t think it’s about whether or not you are a good person; it’s about whether or not you want to be. If you look at the world, if you look at people, if you look at yourself and see room for improvement see scope to become something greater then you could be a worse individual.

You are heading in a good direction; we may never reach the destination but let’s keep going.

The next step is ours to take, yours to take, let’s take it the best way we can.

With a better future and a better world and a better self in our minds eye….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

Thank you for reading, I really appreciate it.