The Art of Goodness
By Otto Do
My mother and father describe my goodness as enigmatic, because they’ve never asked for anything except my own happiness. They’d never intervened to keep me on track. They’ve never screamed or hit me. They claim that luck bore me. Who deemed them lucky? Was it God?
Human goodness—it’s something we all strive for, but when asked to provide a definition, most of us draw a blank. Perhaps that’s by design.
I look to my formative years to answer this question. Elementary education. Calvary Christian School. Here, we would sing each and every day to songs that glorified love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness—values inscribed in the Bible and values that I strive to champion now. I have never believed in a higher power, but Calvary did not know that; to them, I was still a good boy.
Grandmother also attributes my goodness to supernatural decisions, in a way. Instead of thanking God, she credits my grandfather’s good soul. “His good karma has culminated into your birth,” she claims.
When Grandmother says this, I cannot help but blush. My dimples take shape, but then I flatten my expression, only allowing for a moment’s smile. “He’s so humble,” Grandmother would say. I am humble. I abase the joy I feel when someone compliments me. When I am humble, I subdue; my father, though, says I should relish in my own achievements. Grandmother wouldn’t call that self-pride good. She’d call it boastful.
When Exeter’s rigor battered down on me, I spent more and more time with myself. Exeter didn’t force me into that solitude, though. I found myself slipping away from the noise of my peers to pockets of silence where I could be by myself, for myself. In short, solitude gifted me the very ability to think for myself, the very ability to be myself and above all, it made me genuine.
Goodness in solitude, away from others, seems a bit ironic though.
In Judaism, religious texts say that if you save one person, you can look at yourself as somebody who has saved the whole world. In that vein, behavioral economist David Ariely argues that our positive impact on others equates to goodness: “In that regard, what goodness means is to scale the problem down to the size where we can have an impact—and then have the impact.” Others, however, cannot define your goodness, so this doesn’t satisfy me.
From many of my classmates, I have amassed a collection of descriptors—I’m supposedly a “good student” and a “teacher’s pet,” just to name a couple. Time and time again, they question my motives. When I inquire about optional projects and ask teachers about homework they forget to mention, my friends routinely look on with puzzlement. I tell them “I’m not looking for a letter. Can I not just love to learn?” My genuineness scares them. Genuine goodness scares them.
But how does one prescribe goodness? How can you be good? I think a lot of lived experiences are encapsulated by psychologist Harriet Lerner when she writes, “Being a good person requires that we work toward that unrealized world where the dignity and integrity of all human beings, all life, are honored and respected.” Goodness is abstract. I can only say that goodness is a lifelong pursuit and an everlasting effort—it’s never reached but should always be strived for and pondered.
But, precisely because it is undefinable, it can be hard to say with conviction, “I am a good person.” Sometimes, goodness sails on a boat which drifts further and further out to sea. When it reaches the horizon, the borders of goodness blend with greatness. Greatness is harder to reach, because it soars above the water’s surface. However, greatness has metrics—money, power, fame, acme. Goodness, as we know, not so much.
Nevertheless, I still find myself asking whether goodness is more than the pursuit of moral perfection. Must I merely avoid its opposite, sin? Who waves this axe between good and evil? I do not know, but I do not wait for him. My goodness is not conditional. I am good because I do not wait for him. I make my own divine decisions.