Be a Good Person

Daily Meditation 925–9/11/2024

When you’re dying, you won’t look back kindly on ill deeds, but will look back fondly on that which made the world better.

We’ve harped on this quite a bit over the years of the Daily Meditations, but it’s always a good lesson which bears repeating:

We must do good, and we must do good with no expectations of good in return.

There is no real benefit to being a good person, other than the fact you’re, well…a good person!

While being a thief means you get illicit money, being a drug dealer also yields cash, cheating on a spouse enables you more physical pleasures, and being an alcoholic means avoiding many responsibilities and a fictitious “softening” of reality…
Being a good person really doesn’t “yield” you anything rewarding.

The argument to consider is as such:
One day you will die. Whether or not you believe in God or Heaven or Hell or an afterlife aside, you will one day very likely lay on a sickbed in your final moments. Perhaps you, instead, are crushed by a car or plunk over dead from an aneurysm, but most likely you live to some amount of older age and will be laying there to think and consider your life.

When you lay there at 70, 80, or 90, hopefully encircled by dozens of loved ones, will you look back and think “I’m sure glad I cheated on my wife with 10 other women…