Day 2 - What is Good

Learning how to be a good person sounds at first like too basic a question. Like something you should know already, that you were supposed to learn in Kindergarten.

Truthfully though, when I was that age I didn't think critically about what I was being taught. I was able to regurgitate other people's ideas self-righteously if someone asked the questions, but I was in such a hurry to repeat what was fed to me that I never truly took the time to digest it.

It is my habit to do what I am told, to trust that the guiding voice, whether it be my mother, my professors, or other superiors, are right. I expect them to be right because that was the nature of my world growing up. People who were older knew better and could be trusted to guide and lead you. For a person with authority not to do that was a failure on their part, an inability to carry out their assigned role.

My mom took her responsibility as a parent when she was younger so seriously that she was the final word on many things. She instilled a strong sense of justice in me. The problem with that was that I came to expect that from the world, and to judge when it was not so. The other consequence, of course, was that sometimes I did not wrestle enough with big questions on my own, and that I did not think enough for myself.

Certainly there were things which I questioned, and it is in my nature to enjoy new ideas and argumentation. To challenge, and debate. Unfortunately I don't think that I did this enough with some very basic but very important questions. Perhaps until now there was no need.

It is too ambitious for me to attempt to answer the question "how to be a good person." Implicit in this question is the quandry of how to answer this question- to define the scope of what parts of this question can be answered and how. A list of good behaviors? Behaviors to avoid? No. I think the real tricky part of this is teaching yourself how to evaluate your own behavior and other people's. It cannot be a blanket list of rules. There are two many situations and details in reality for a list to name each situation and address its remedy. To define how to be good you must first determine what you believe is good.