She didn’t realize until she was older that she was mistaken.
I’ll cut to the chase, I won’t beat around the bush here because in the summation of her misconception is the story. She realized that the all-encompassing way of life her parents taught her to embrace was diabolical.
The way of life, the rules to live by were easy to grasp: be a decent human being, accept people and circumstances the way they are, don’t judge unless required by civic duty and never swerve the car to run over a ground hog deliberately. The ideas mentioned were diabolical because they required her to “be good.” To accomplish such a litany left life just as thin as finding a surface with nothing beneath it.
Her soul, her psyche, her intuition screamed out against her very strong mind against the very thinness of ‘good.’ Her soul, her psyche, her intuition were parts of her that knew something was missing: being bad. That list (being bad) expands and blossoms into thousands of ideas which when scrutinized falls under the title, “not so bad.”
Are there those who grow old and die and say during that process that their parents may be wrong but never waiver from the path set upon? Did no one every strip down naked in the town square and renounce their parent’s wealth and egotistical plans for their future?
Well, she was that close. No, she had no experience other than reading in which to understand that the narrowing down of the flat surface of “good,” or “goodness,” or even that dreaded apparition, “being good,” meant, in reality, a deep pool of cool gloom. Good alone was a drowning, quasi suffocating sort of life.
The trouble started when she read a passage from an author (an old dusty prophet long dead) whom her parents would have thought from the pedantic, judgmental and self-righteous camp. She got the idea from said prophet that if she stopped the flattening out of “good,” pumped it up with challenge and sprinkled it with “go the other direction,” she may find something interesting and outside the realm of not so bad.
But alas, where to start? How could she focus on a point of interest when her once lofty place in life was now deflated with knowledge? To further complicate matters, her life was not boring, it was worse; it was busy. She was busy in flattening out the rest of the world and smiling blithely over the serene faces that she left in her wake. Ah, the committees and the protests and the blogs and the lowercase alphabet after her name; everything her parents desired for her.
When the prophet’s words first jumped out from the page at her she went on a debauched rampage. She slept with any man that had a surprised look on his face when she propositioned him. Her good friends clucked just a little and excused her actions by the absolution of ‘she’s going through something.’
Then she drank with her friends and felt sick. So she spent money on a sticky beach front vacation in the Caribbean that she had planned for the year before. She focused her mind on the sound of the sun rising and setting and she abstained from self gratification so she could drown out the words resounding in her head; ‘be good.’
“So what brings you here?” The priest looked straight at her.
“I can’t be good anymore and I need you to tell me how to be human.”
“Have you ever heard of the word humility?” His dark eyebrows raised with the question.
“Yes… but isn’t that being good?”
“No, it’s realizing you don’t need anyone to recognize you as good.”
The world looked less flat, so she decided she could start with that.
