Be Good and You Will Be Lonesome

"Be good and you will be lonesome." —Mark Twain

So what is being good?  A peek into my dictionary shows that the word “good” is an adjective more than anything else, a descriptor. The dictionary  says: high quality, excellent, superior, as it ought to be, right, proper, admirable, satisfactory, desirable,  polite, does what is right, doing right, just, kind, friendly, honorable, worthy, reliable, dependable, real, genuine, agreeable,  pleasant, beneficial, advantageous, useful, satisfying, enough, full, skillful, clever, acceptable, actual, serious.

I have to say, I am certain I could never live up to the entire list of qualities displayed under the definition of the word  "good".


My dictionary also has some definitions based on the word “good” being a noun – 1 benefit, advantage, use 2 that which is good 3. A good thing 4. good people 5. Philosophy – something that is considered as belonging to the world’s moral order.

Finally, something we mere mortals can work with. The philosophical concept of that which is good is that which is moral. 

I was thinking that Mark Twain and I might be having a parting of the ways on this issue.  If you are good are you destined to be lonesome? I like being around good people.  I seem to know quite a few, actually. Perhaps I just keep good company.  Of course, the people I think of as morally good aren’t generally the same people I know who run around announcing through a trumpet just how good they are.


 Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness.  If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most.  It is not complicated but it takes courage.  It takes courage for a person to listen to his own good.  Pablo Casals

   

Thinking about it further, I realized that it is true.  When you decide to be good, it can certainly feel lonely.  Especially if you are young and you haven’t had much time to practice at it. Your friends walk away to have a “good time” doing bad things. Your coworkers decide that wrong is right and you are left standing by the water cooler alone.  Turn from taunting someone and others may decide to taunt you instead. Yes, doing right can feel lonely and It can take courage, as well.

Be good and you will find that you have the true respect of others. You will have acquired a habit that lasts a lifetime and gives huge dividends in self-respect and self-worth.

“The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.  To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.”  Albert Einstein

Don’t join the herd of cattle. Be an individual.  Be good even if it can feel just a bit lonely at times. Your good reputation cannot be bought or traded and the true joy of living comes from having high ideals.

Go see my new blog.  http://agardeninthesun.blogspot.com/   It is called A Garden in the Sun. Insight, Inspiration and ... Mark Twain?  seems too limiting as it is designed to help me learn how to write articles for the newspaper.  I thank several of my online and in person friends for helping to be a better writer and I hope you will continue to help me with this endeavor in  the future.

Newspaper articles about religion and non-belief is a fantastic idea and I am going to see what I can do about talking to the local paper about doing just that.  So, I will continue to try to craft those types of articles on this website every so  often.  Keep commenting and emailing me with your critiques folks.  I appreciate it!!!!

The Best Way to Cheer Yourself...

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up." — Mark Twain

No doubt about it, being a cheerer upper can really cheer you up.  Maybe it is because when you give of yourself, you feel uplifted. The focus is off of you and onto someone else. Or maybe you end up fostering an attitude of gratitude once you see that others often have bigger problems than you do.   If you look around there is always someone worse off than you are.

I have often felt that Abraham Lincoln got it right when he said: "Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."   I believe that.  After all, you are what you think. Take control of your brain. Think happy thoughts and you get happier. Think gloomy thoughts and spirits go downhill. 

It would be lovely if we were all born cheerful people but, for most of us, being cheerful is a work in progress.   “There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.” Francois-Marie Voltaire.  Work is a ship. Love is a sail. Art and knowledge are stars sprinkling our interior skies, guiding us into new lands and back to familiar pastures.

Cheerfulness is a tonic for both the mind and the body. There is no doubt that the mind has a profound effect on the body. People like Christopher Reeve, who maintained a good attitude despite his immense misfortune at being paralyzed from the neck down, show us that the mind can be more important than the body it lives in.  He was an atheist, by the way. Some take comfort in their religious beliefs but there are others who find their way without religion. 

We all find our own path.  While some find a belief in a god to be invaluable, while others do not.  This is not an indictment.  It is an acknowledgement that beliefs are personal and no one belief system can work for us all.  God believing or unbelieving, does it matter if you are striving to be a little kinder, more loving, more courageous, more giving each and every day?  Zealots of all types tend to forget the finiteness of being human.

One last benefit.  “Cheerfulness and contentment,” says Charles Dickens, “are great beautifiers and are famous preservers of youthful looks.”  Your life story shows on your face.  We are born with the face that nature gives us. We end up with the face of our nature.  Train your nature to smile often, love immensely and be of good cheer and your face will reflect that as you grow older. No plastic surgery needed. 

If all else fails, cheer up, it could be worse. Sure, it is thunderstorms today but, like the weather, life changes all the time.  There is always the chance of partly cloudy skies or even sunshine tomorrow. Look forward to sunnier days.

The Obligatory Christmas Article

The approach of Christmas brings harrassment and dread to many excellent people. They have to buy a cart-load of presents, and they never know what to buy to hit the various tastes; they put in three weeks of hard and anxious work, and when Christmas morning comes they are so dissatisfied with the result, and so disappointed that they want to sit down and cry. Then they give thanks that Christmas comes but once a year. - Following the Equator Mark Twain

Mark Twain doesn't have a whole lot to say about Christmas so I was doing a little research. Okay, very little research. I went to Wikipedia  [I owe you guys a donation] for the Obligatory Christmas Article I am about to write. 

We are all well aware that Christmas is on Dec. 25^th.   But did you know, on that date, the Constitution of the Republic of China was signed? That's Taiwan to you and me. The Taiwanese declared Constitution Day as a national secular holiday and it is celebrated much like Christmas. 

The Twelve Days of Christmas starts on the 25^th and runs until Jan 6^th.

I noticed that the Armenian Apostolic Christmas is January 6 and the Eastern Orthodox Christmas is on January 7^th.  Not December 25^th. I don’t know why.

Saint’s Days are very popular this time of year. All Saints Day kicks off the season on Nov. 1^st. [We call it Nevada Day and celebrate our statehood although there probably isn't a single saint in the entire state.] St Nicholas [Dec. 6]; St Stephen [Dec. 26]; St John the Evangelist [Dec 27]; St Sylvester [Dec. 31]; St Basil [Jan 1] – they all have their own individual Saint’s Days.  

These two holidays startled me - January 1^st is the Feast of Circumcision Day AND the Feast of Fool’s Day.  Probably no coincidence there.  You’d have to be a fool to volunteer for circumcision.

Numerous festivals are celebrated around the shortest day [or is that the longest night?] of the year, Dec. 21st.  Yule, Yalda, Saturnalia and a whole slew of others around the world.  New Agers and Pagans seem to like these holidays.  Australia and New Zealand have to celebrate winter solstice in June.  They’re a little backwards down there.

Humanists picked the 23^rd for their HumanLIght Day.  Americans love Christmas Eve and the Brits love Boxing Day on the day after Christmas. Pancha Ganapti isn’t well-known here but the Hindus celebrate the patron god of the arts from Dec 21^st thru the 25^th.  Kwanzaa starts on the 26^th and runs through January 1^st. Hanukkah is a confusing holiday unless, of course, if you are Jewish.  It has a different set of dates every year.

Atheists don’t seem to have any specific holidays of their own.  Since there is no creed or specific guidelines when you have a non-belief in god or gods, they tend enjoy whatever holidays are meaningful to them as individuals.

Whatever  you are celebrating this time of year, I hope we can all agree that New Year’s Day holds the promise of bright tomorrows and that New Year's resolutions, like hangovers, soon wear off.  I wish you all a Happy Holiday Season,  whatever  that may mean for you.  Me, I think I’ll start with All Saint’s Day on November 1^st and celebrate every day of mirth, merriment, singing, dancing,feasting and getting gifts that I can find well into January.  

Travel is fatal to prejudice

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Mark Twain

Mark Twain makes a good point. When you travel you often are surprised by just how much we human beings are alike despite our differing ways of speaking and our differing styles of dress and our differing cultures.

Maya Angelou says “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”

When I was young, I lived in several parts of the Seattle area that were literally all white.  I don’t recall ever meeting a single black person before I went to Junior High.  I didn’t actually meet the two [count ‘em –two] black kids that finally came to our school.  They were celebrities.  She was on the cheerleading team.  Her brother was just as well known.

As time went by, at various jobs, social get togethers and in my little travels around the West, I got to know quite a diversity of people.  And whether they were Hispanic or African American or Easterners [folks, from New York City who talk really fast or from New Jersey who are quite forceful in their way of speaking] or India Indians or Vietnamese or Japanese or Peruvian, I started realizing that for all of our differences, we are all just people. 

We have our superstitions and our fears.  We have our expectations and our goals.  We have love and we have hate. There is good and bad available within each of our hearts.  Just about no person is all good or all bad. 

I’m willing to make a few exceptions on the all bad ones.  There are a few humans I don’t think have much good in them. Fortunately, they are the exception in a vast sea of people that are pretty decent.

And I am certain that I haven’t met a single person who is all good.  Nope, not a single saint although they may have had others fooled.  I have met a few that think awfully highly of themselves and  I think they rank themselves a bit higher in goodness than is warranted.

I haven’t felt the need to respect everyone I have ever met.  Really, there are a some people I can just barely tolerate.  But I have tried very hard to remember that each one of us is only human. We have a little good and a little bad in all of us.  In my lifetime, I have found that to be so of all races and creeds and different religious or non-religious beliefs.

The Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Mormons, Buddhists, the New Age spiritulists and all the other religious folks I have met, along with the non-believers of all sorts, the various doubters, agnostics and atheists have been a mixed bag.  No one group has the only good there is in the world. Nor all the bad for that matter.

I have traveled throughout the West and been as far as Texas and little further. I have had the opportunity to meet many people by now.  And I find this Mark Twain quotation to be quite apt: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” 

Irreverence

“Irreverence is another person’s disrespect to your god; there isn’t any word that tells what your disrespect to his god is.” Mark Twain, “The Mysterious Stranger”


My dictionary says that irreverence is a noun that means: 1. lack of reverence, disrespect. 2. An act showing irreverence. 3. The condition of not being held in reverence; dishonor.


So that leads us to ask what is reverence?  n 1. A feeling of deep respect, mixed with wonder, fear, and love syn veneration, adoration.


I will guarantee when it comes to any particular god or gods that no one can have a feeling of deep respect mixed with wonder, fear and love if they do not believe in a particular god or gods. If they don't believe they can't be reverent.  So, if they can't be reverent they can't be irreverent either.  They just don't see what you are seeing. 


Even Christians have differing versions of God as professed by the many doctrines, creeds and statements of belief that each church subscribes to independently of all the other denominations of Christian worshipers.  Baptists think Catholics get it wrong who think Episcopalians get it wrong who think  Seventh Day Adventists get it wrong who think Universalists get it wrong and so on until we come full circle.   


There are those that think there is one great God while there are others who prescribe to many gods- such as the Hindus.  Deists generally think that god is a force that is synonymous with nature. Agnostics think you can’t prove the existence of god nor can you disprove it and generally lean toward either non-theist agnosticism or theist agnosticism.   Atheists just don’t believe there is a god, any god, at all.  None of these viewpoints is necessarily disrespectful of YOUR belief.  People are not generally being irreverent of YOUR belief.  They simply have their own beliefs for their own reasons.  


Truth be told, most people are born Hindu or Moslem or Mormon or Christian or any number of religions because that is the religion that prevails in their family, their neighborhood or their country. What I am saying is that people are generally not disrespecting your God-vision.  They just don’t believe in it.  Whether others are a True Believer or a non-believer or any of the thousands of stances in between this is not  generally a matter of irreverence towards YOUR god belief system.  Your beliefs works for you and that should be enough.  Drop your guard a little and see the person instead of the label.

Kindness

Mark Twain said that “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”  Kindness is a theme that runs through cultures like a river of water in the desert.  A simple act of kindness can save someone from despair and nourish a person’s sense of self worth.

Kindness is considered a virtue around the world, something to strive for and something to give freely. 

“All of the Torah can be summed up in one word: Chesed.  It means kindness. “ Rabbi Dr. Arthur Segal [Jewish]

“Show kindness and mercy to all beings, and realize that the Lord is pervading everywhere; this is the way of the enlightened soul….”   Guru Granth Sahib {Sikh]

The Dalai Lama says “When we feel love and kindness towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.” And scientific studies support this view.  People who commit acts of kindness are happier and have a better sense of well-being.

I think kindness is a natural reaction that can be nurtured within our selves and our society.  Don’t be afraid to commit an act of kindness.  It shows empathy towards others and a connection to those around us.  Kindness spreads from one person to another.  It is contagious. 

My favorite quote on kindness is this one - “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.”  Plato [428BC-347BC]

Life is tough for all of us.  We are all of us fighting our own hard battles.  A small act of kindness can let people know they are not alone and the world isn’t such a bad place after all.