She didn\u2019t realize until she was older that she was mistaken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ll cut to the chase, I won\u2019t beat around the bush here because in the summation of her misconception is the story.\u00a0 She realized that the all-encompassing way of life her parents taught her to embrace was diabolical.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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 \u201cbe good.\u201d To accomplish such a litany left life just as thin as finding a surface with nothing beneath it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her soul, her psyche, her intuition screamed out against her very strong mind against the very thinness of \u2018good.\u2019\u00a0 Her soul, her psyche, her intuition were parts of her that knew something was missing: being bad.\u00a0 That list (being bad) expands and blossoms into thousands of ideas which\u00a0when scrutinized falls under the title, \u201cnot so bad.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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?\u00a0 Did no one every strip down naked in the town square and renounce their parent\u2019s wealth and egotistical plans for their future?
Well, she was that close.\u00a0 No, she had no experience other than reading in which to understand that the narrowing down of the flat surface of \u201cgood,\u201d or \u201cgoodness,\u201d or even that dreaded apparition, \u201cbeing good,\u201d meant, in reality, a deep pool of cool gloom.\u00a0 Good alone was a drowning, quasi suffocating sort of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trouble started when she read a passage from an author (an old dusty prophet long dead) whom her parents would\u00a0have thought from the pedantic, judgmental and self-righteous camp.\u00a0 She got the idea from said prophet that if she stopped the flattening out of \u201cgood,\u201d pumped it up with challenge and sprinkled it with \u201cgo the other direction,\u201d she may find something interesting and outside the realm of not so bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But alas, where to start?\u00a0 How could she focus on a point of interest when her once lofty place in life was\u00a0now\u00a0deflated with knowledge?\u00a0 To further complicate matters, her life was not boring, it was worse; it was busy.\u00a0 She was\u00a0busy 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the prophet\u2019s words first jumped out from the page at her she went on a debauched rampage.\u00a0 She slept with any man that had a surprised look on his face when she propositioned him.\u00a0 Her good friends clucked just a little and excused her actions by the absolution of \u2018she\u2019s going through something.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then she drank with her friends and felt sick.\u00a0 So she spent money on a sticky beach front vacation in the Caribbean that she had planned for the year before.\u00a0 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; \u2018be good.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSo what brings you here?\u201d\u00a0 The priest looked straight at her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI can\u2019t be good anymore and I need you to tell me how to be human.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHave you ever heard of the word humility?\u201d His dark eyebrows raised with the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYes\u2026 but isn\u2019t that being good?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo, it\u2019s realizing you don\u2019t need anyone to recognize you as good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The world looked less flat, so she decided she could start with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Her soul, her psyche, her intuition screamed out against her very strong mind against the very thinness of \u2018good.\u2019 Her soul, her psyche, her intuition were parts of her that knew something was missing: being bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,3],"tags":[11,13,24],"class_list":["post-414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-story","category-flash-fiction","category-short-fiction","tag-amwriting","tag-flashfic","tag-vss"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":659,"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414\/revisions\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lydiaink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}