Doing Some Good

 This time of year showcases the need to both do good and try to feel good where people around you are not having it so well. Over the weekend, I was in Chicago to see a former student perform at Second City as she seeks to live her dream to become a cast member of SNL. As a career coach, I love watching people approach their dreams feeling supported and fully invested in them. But, I realize it is truly from a vantage point of privilege that I get to see so much. Sadly, while in Chicago, I also saw people begging for help on the street, workers in hotels, museums, and restaurants being treated disrespectfully by their guests, and other such atrocious behavior that happens all over the world, each and every day.

When the worst problem I have got is where to park my car in a city where I used to live, I know I have so-called "First World Problems", but what of those other 1st world people who also live among us? How is it right that a person has to beg for subsistence in a country that has amassed so much of the world's wealth? A normal reaction to the needy is to blame them for their circumstances, to assume they somehow are responsible for their mistreatment. I know it makes some people feel better about their own inaction to think this way. It is a cruel rationalization, but I get it. 

When a chance to do some good is standing in front of you, what choice will you make? I don't always live up to my own lofty ambitions--do you? But, when I do some good, I feel the good. Call it philanthropy, call it charity, or whatever you want, but it turns out that good is a gift unto itself. Good begets good.

So why do we deprive ourselves of that feeling? In walks modern culture and the siren song of consumerism. Buy yourself something and, just like that, you feel good. Give something to someone else and you feel empty or worse like you have sacrificed something you value. And consumerism trains us to not like the feeling of want. Worse, we want to want to want. Want is an honest feeling--as babies, we bawled our eyes out to get our needs met. We needed food and our screams sounded that want. But need and want are very different. Literally, they are the difference between life and death. If you are freezing a coat is a need. If you are hungry, food is a need. If you are poor, money is a need. 

We want to do good more than we need to do good. But, what if we were desperate to do some good? I mean, what if we couldn't live if we did not do good? Like oxygen in our lungs, what if our need to do good rose to that level? Because it sure feels sometimes that our wants for material things feel like needs. Like we can't survive without the larger house, car, job, etc. But, what if we could take that feeling and transfer it to the lives of others? To allow ourselves that real good feeling from doing good.

Could we not transform ourselves, our planet, our purpose by giving in to our better nature? That way everyone could experience the good and we all could be transformed to see each other differently and maybe, for the first time, we have a degree of humanity that we have thus far denied ourselves the view.