You Do Not Have to Be Good

There is a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver called Wild Geese, that begins:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Imagine that: you do not have to be good.  Words like these start revolutions.  We are used to placing great importance on being good.  What does good mean?  In my life, "good" has three dimensions:

1. Good in the moral sense; the opposite of evil

2. Good in the accomplishment sense; competent, skilled, talented, clever, correct, etc.

3. Good in the social sense; nice, polite, appropriate, not rocking the boat or causing others discomfort

I am a Capricorn.  Eldest child.  Daughter of immigrant parents.  I've got a PhD in business, and worked for ten years as a management consultant.  I tend toward the sensible and reliable.  I exercise regularly.  In short, I've drunk enough of the "good" Kool-Aid to choke me, and to paralyze lesser mortals.

Okay, trying to be good in all its various senses served me quite well in the first half of my life.  The benefits are many, including academic achievement, easy relationships with parents and friends, steady, rewarding employment, and a measure of financial freedom.  But as I move into what is likely to be the second half of my life, I see that something wilder and more internally determined will be required.

Because being good is a heavy burden.  It strangles creativity, spontaneity, and adventure.  It causes you to self-impose unnecessary limitations.  It sets up an infrastructure of expectations that can topple over and bury you at any moment.  It guarantees a huge, unruly shadow side that either eats you from within or busts out periodically and wrecks the place. 

So I decided when I turned 40 to start unlearning four decades of "good".  Saying "no" more often.  Walking out of plays and movies I don't like.  Stretching myself to explore the wild, the frivolous, the erotic, the challenging, the inappropriate, the unconventional sides of experience.  Doing more of what I want and less of what I "should".  Taking some more risks.

And perhaps most important right now, I am learning to give myself permission to do things badly.  Before completing my own, I used to think that people with PhDs must be particularly intelligent.  Now I know the only thing the degree really signals is that the holder is damn stubborn, and refused to go home until it was done.  Similarly, I used to think that writing a book or having my own blog would be evidence that I had something significant to say.  But really it means I've given myself permission to write poorly in public.  And that is, for me, a far greater accomplishment than writing well.  It gives me hope that I may yet take up the tabla drums, knowing that when I'm 80 I might still really suck, but at least I'll be playing them.

Right now, as I begin to think about returning to work, periods of inspiration alternate with paralysis.  I recognize that paralysis is sometimes "good" rearing its tyrannical Barbie-doll head.  So I'm paying attention to Mary Oliver.  So what if my first choice isn't perfect?  So what if I struggle to learn something new?  So what if some people I meet don't share my vision?  Ha!  I declare that's fine, because I don't have to be good.