What Good Looks Like
This article was first published in the Minden Times in November, 2024.
While I’m mining my history for inspiration and courage, it occurs to me that another mantra by which I live my life is What Good Looks Like.
Most, maybe all, dysfunctional systems focus on the problem. The health system: what ails you? The education system: what don’t you know? The justice system: what punishment should we mete? The political system: what you did wrong or didn’t do right (no question marks in that system, only exclamation marks!). Even the media that’s supposed to reflect reality specializes in the down and dirty: if it bleeds it leads.
The problem with focusing on problems is that it makes them worse. It celebrates the bad. It makes us feel hopeless and helpless and useless. It sucks our life blood, we become walking dead. Walking dead can’t solve problems.
What can solve problems? Well, first and foremost, intent. Posing something as a problem to be solved is step one in changing the world for the better. Any world: interior world (anger, anxiety, sadness), exterior world (two feet of snow on the driveway, uncooked meat and veg in the fridge, dirty clothes), my world (see preceding), your world (_____ fill in the blank).
I learned this from Nipon, a charming monk from Thailand who billeted at our house for a week. He entertained us with stories about his homeland and the challenges he faced trying to successfully settle people driven into the cities by circumstances in their home communities. I remember one story about the un-wisdom of designing housing for the masses that was several storeys high, presumably to more quickly and cheaply meet the need. Except the migrants brought their animals with them. And Nipon said, ‘How to solve the problem of getting the goats to and from the third floor?’ Always, his stories got around to ‘How to solve the problem…’ of the great and the mundane, including, as supper ended before the conversation, ‘…these dirty dishes on the table.’
He never said Shall we solve the problem? Or We can’t possibly solve that problem. Or It’s not our problem if they brought animals. Or. Or. Or. It was HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Intent.
So the second step, Nipon the Thai guru suggested, was to imagine what the solutions to the problem might look like. I have vague recollection of goats being hauled up by ropes from balconies, being carried up the stairs like sacks of grain – but very likely that’s my imagination trying to find what might work to solve the problem, not the ones that the people who lived in those buildings came up with. The magic, Nipon said, was engaging the wisdom and experience of the people whose problem it was because their imaginations held the secret to success. They were motivated to solve the problem (intent) and they knew – or could eventually imagine -- what good looks like.
WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE was the second phrase that Nipon injected into my head for posterity and multi-faceted usefulness. He didn’t ask what good is – that is easily a decade of debate. He didn’t quibble about good enough versus not good enough. He insisted Good be tangible, something you could describe. And recognizable, something you would know when you see it. Something a group of people who are trying collectively to solve a shared problem could draw a picture of.
What good looks like is what might otherwise be called a goal, but it is a goal that will be recognizes when you have achieved it, which many goals are not. That certainty motivates the development and implementation of a plan. It may be a many-stepped plan. Each step requires a further fine-tuning of what does good look like and reviewing what is needed to achieve the goal and how the necessary can be acquired, etc etc etc. Step by step the little dog got to Dover. Nipon might have called it perseverance.
Nipon’s third lesson? It’s that change is constant, so you need to celebrate whenever you get to what good looks like. Why? Because you need to feel, at least for a moment, your power and potency and know that you are equipped to live life well. That optimism and self-confidence is important (and is what is missing from the walking dead) because we know that as soon as we solve one problem, another will make itself known. Because change is constant, in nature, in life. Which is good; things that do not change are boring or dead.
Nipon’s lessons are a good frame within which to view a coming year that will almost certainly be challenging. How to solve the problem? What does good look like? Change is constant.
