Who is good?

When I asked my brother to pick up a movie to watch together about three weeks ago, I knew he was not going to waste any time thinking about it, and when he handed me the 'seven pounds', I knew it was probably because it was the first one he had seen on the scattered mess of DVDs in his drawer. A little discouraged, I watched the movie, checked the new words and searched the internet for reviews. I had decided that I did not like the movie very much.

We watched about thirty minutes of the movie, then paused and started to talk about it. My brother asked me what I thought about Ben, the man who was going to donate some parts of his body to a few good people as some sort of penance, and I told him that I did not like this man at all. Naturally my brother asked me the reason, and I surprised myself with my reply. I told my brother that I did not like the way he chose the good people, because how can you tell if somebody is good? Do you even have the right? My brother gave me his idea of a good man, but I was unable to answer the same question.

Who is a good person?

Can you reel off some apparently positive characteristics from mind and whoever possesses them, or at least has some of them, is good and the others who lack them would be considered as bad? As in an honest, kind and merciful man is good, and therefore a lying, unkind and unmerciful person is bad?

Are there any preventive-directive approaches toward being good? Can anybody claim that there is an unchanging way that if you follow, you'll turn out good, and if you don't, you unavoidably turn out to be bad?

Is goodness something absolute and unconditional? Can we presume that goodness is the same in every country, every city and every home and it has been the same since the time of Adam and Eve up to the twenty first century? Can we assume that no matter what changes, good people will always stay the same?

Can we measure goodness, or can we claim that somebody is better than another? Between a martyr for his country and a mother who has given her heart to her child, which one would you pick, or would you claim that both of them had their own selfish reasons and do not pick at all?

Well, all these questions made me wonder. I personally believe that goodness is conditional. It changes all the time, and the only thing constant about it is that it is based on conditions.

Let us presume that cheating is bad, that is, it is not good. Now imagine yourself in this position: You have a classmate whom you consider a knowledgeable person who always tries hard to get what she wants. You know her mother has passes away a few days ago and she has had no chance to study. You also realize that she desperately needs that grade. Would you still consider cheating bad, or would you be willing to bend that rule a little?

Lying is bad, right? But what if a doctor lies to a committee to get his dying patient the liver he desperately needs? Lying doesn't look so bad now, does it?

This quality of goodness is why it makes it so difficult to possess. Everything changes all the time, and it takes more than following a common definition of goodness to make you a good human.

But then if this is true, then how do you know who is good and obviously who is bad, or worse, how do you try to be good?

I personally believe that there is more to this world than we see, and whatever we do and whatever we say will have an impact on the world, and consequently on us. The effect we will have on the world will be the cause of another effect and that is how important we are, and if we do not know what goodness is, we not only harm ourselves, we'd do the same to the universe.

A good man is one who tries, really at least tries, to rise above the tangled web of superficialities that we have made. A good man is one who sees there is more to this world and does whatever he can to be human, and that is not as easy as it sounds.

In order to be good, you don't have to be a bundle of joy or a ray of sunshine. You do not have to spend all your income on the abandoned children. Really, all you have to do is to be good in what you have a gift for. It doesn't matter if it's saving lives, writing a story or fixing a pipe. You can be as grumpy as you want. It wouldn't really matter as long as you save a dying girl whose only left hope is you.

My version of goodness may sound a little radical or even a little selfish, but I truly believe in the greater good. That is if you have to lie to your slow-witted boss to get the money you need to spend it where it's truly needed, then there is nothing wrong with it, because everything is relative, and everything is a tool which can be used either for a right or wrong reason.

My version of goodness means that sometimes you will do what is right and inevitably you'll make mistakes, but then you can die contented and say with a smile: 'at least I tried.'

Being good at what you do makes life much easier and all the more difficult, doesn't it?