I try to be good but sometimes
a person just has to break out and
act like the wild and springy thing
one used to be. It’s impossible not
to remember wild and want it back.
—Excerpt from the poem Green, Green is My Sister’s House by Mary Oliver
It’s gift giving season. It’s gift giving season and if I could give you seven words as a gift, it would be the words I have given myself hundreds of times over the course of the last year, in journal entries, in scribbled notes and in my mind as mantra. It would be these: You do not have to be good.
And what I mean is, you don’t have to be good in the way you’ve been told. You don’t have to be good in the way someone else wants you to be. You don’t have to be good in the old way: Obedient, unquestioning, uncontroversial, static, stable, even, most especially, nice.
This is only an imaginary good. This is the kind of good that will never feel good. As Simone Weil said, “Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” To not be good is not to be bad, but rather to be good in the new way: Curious, creative, experimental, bold, honest, at ease – best of all, to some, unlikable and unapologetically so.
How much effort have we put in to being an imaginary kind of good according to an imaginary someone else? How much time have we wasted waiting for them to tell us that we’re good, that we’re likeable, that we’re lovable? How much longer will we wait?
To be good in the new way is to live in alignment with your values, the ones you have uncovered as important through your lived experience. To be good in the new way is to be courageous in your heartfelt participation with life, on your terms. Not later, but now.
No, we don’t have to be good in the way it has been implied. We don’t have to stay quiet to make others more comfortable. We don’t have to say that we’re okay when we’re not. We don’t have to act like this charade has come naturally to us. We can fall apart. We can be angry. We can be too tired to try. We can change our mind as many times as it takes. We can say we don’t care when we don’t, and that it’s not enough when it isn’t, and enough’s enough when it is.
And yes, to be good in the new way we might risk disappointing others. Maybe that’s another new kind of good. Maybe disappointing others, without disappointing ourselves, is part of what it means to live a good and healthy life. Isn’t it better to be disappointing, than to be good in the old way? Isn’t it better to be awake, to not miss it, to say the things on our hearts, to be the one we’ve always been and always thought we could be… than to be an imaginary kind of good?
To be good in the new way is to define that word for yourself and to sleep soundly at night knowing that that’s what you are. You are good, according to you, because you know that what’s better than being good is knowing that you don’t have to be.
If I could give you seven words as a gift, it would be these: You do not have to be good.
happy winter solstice
May this darkest of days remind you that the light always returns. As you winter over the weeks to come, let it be okay to move slower, to eat more butter and chocolate, to go to bed at eight o’clock and sleep for 12 hours, to have soup and casseroles for every meal. Don’t worry about getting more done before the clock strikes midnight on the last day of the year. We’re meant to move in tune with the cycles and seasons of nature. Use these last days to celebrate that you’re here, that you made it, good or bad or good in a different way, that you lived another year.
holiday reading
These suggestions for celebrating the long midwinter, from Solstice to the New Year, from
, author of Wintering.This insightful read on modern friendship (and modern loneliness) by
.These simple and powerful ways to cultivate curiosity and connection from NYT Opinion columnist David Brooks.
holiday listening
A new season of the The Atlantic’s How To podcast. I especially loved this episode on the absurdity of our busy schedules.
And this episode of Huberman Lab, featuring psychologist Adam Grant. It’s a lengthy discussion on unlocking potential that makes a positive case for a healthy amount of procrastinating and in which Grant says, “languishing might be evolutionarily adaptive.”
Beautiful reminders!!!!!
Have fun not being good over the holiday season!!!!!