Indestructible Goodness

There is such a thing as goodness. It is alive. It is intact. Nothing we do can destroy it.

By goodness, I don’t mean the opposite of badness, exactly. I certainly don’t mean anything sentimental, saccharine…soulless. Ew. Goodness is not goody-goody or cute.

The earth is good. There is goodness in love. Friends are good. Teachers are good and so are students. It can sometimes be good to have an enemy. Pets are good. Reconciliation is good, as are courage, kindness, devotion, dignity, and confusion. The capacity to care—even to notice goodness or non-goodness—is good. Laughing is good and so is crying. Wisdom, insight, and intuition are good. It is good to be fierce and it is good to be soft. Vulnerability is good. Sadness is very good. Anger can sometimes be good and so can doubt. It is good that you can get your feelings hurt because this means your goodness has been wounded and, well, that hurts. (Even though it feels bad, it is good.) Healing is good. There is goodness in art, extraordinary goodness, perhaps the very most.

These things are happening all the time. But none of them need be present in order to feel the goodness because it is always present—in you. Your tenderness reminds you of it and so do your longing, tears, and capacity for joy which are not so different from each other.

The thing that is not so good? Forgetting the goodness. Letting it slide. Hiding from it.

Denying goodness sometimes seems easier than affirming it, however to do so is actually dangerous. With this denial come cruelty, violence, abandonment, and the inability to recognize what is precious and real. We see “us and them” in all things. We perceive attacks where there are none. We are afraid all the time and from this fear come fundamentalism, intolerance, stupidity, and absurdly short-term thinking.

Affirming it reasserts the truth.There is nothing more radical that you can do. It will make some people mad, but do it anyway. Just one person can remind a multitude.

categorized in: dharma