What Little I Know: Human Nature

Nothing matters more in this life than how you see yourself and how you see others. When I first met your dad, I had only a few years' practice in seeing the good in myself. Up until then, I had lived my life with a crippling fear of impending doom. Something was always coming to get me because—the prevailing messages insisted—I was inherently evil and prone to wickedness.

How we see human nature is directly connected to how "workable" life's hardest situations appear. If we see ourselves as fundamentally flawed, doomed to fail or on the fast track to damnation, this sends a harmful message that reverberates in every area of our existence. It implies that because we are made of badness at the core of who we are, then bad things and bad behaviors are naturally at home in us—almost as if they're unavoidable. It sends a message that we are somehow conditioned and inclined and supposed to be lonely, afraid, mistreated, yelled at, depressed, talked down to, neglected, ridiculed and so forth. A belief in inherent badness always leaves a back door swinging around our inherent worth. In my experience, that door ends up letting all sorts of other cruel, unproductive messages creep in, too.

 The best way I've found to make it through this world is to see people's actions as separate from their substance. When I think about someone's substance, I close my eyes and imagine their internal organs, muscles, veins, brains, eyeballs, feet, skin and so forth. And then I imagine the sum total of every laugh, every hug, every kind word, every happy dinnertime conversation they'll ever have. Holding all those parts of a person together is this invisible substance or glue that I call goodness. It's not measurable because goodness is available in unlimited supply inside each person. And because it's invisible to our human eyes, it can often be tough to find inside ourselves or others. But it is there.

 Not everyone sees things this way. And it's not too terribly difficult to understand why. People's actions can be rotten. I mean, they can be downright icky, deceitful and even violent. But this doesn't mean that their inner substance has changed in any way, even when their actions are causing harm. They still have goodness through and through, just waiting to come to the surface and transform them. Sometimes, for lots of reasons, we humans have a hard time finding our way to and connecting with that goodness. We get confused. And we forget that inside us is a wellspring of compassion and unlimited goodness, just waiting to be put into action.

 I lived much of my life being told that I was inherently bad, terrible or rotten. I could do nothing right, it seemed—no matter how much I tried to get people to see all the warmth and love in my heart. There was always a thump waiting for me, or a rule I overlooked. It took me a long time to escape that thinking and to summon the courage to flip the script in my head. When I did, I realized that the life I wanted to build was only ever going to flourish if I let goodness be the first and final answer on who I am and who others are.

 Basic goodness says that we all have the capacity to wake up to our true nature. That we have the ability to cultivate ever-growing reserves of compassion, to wake up our eyes to injustice, to let down our guard and to be connected in meaningful ways with one another. I first learned about basic goodness when I began meditating and studying Buddhist teachings in 2013. The Buddhists aren't the only ones who approach human nature from this perspective, but they do seem to have an eye on it more than a lot of other religious groups. No matter which, if any, religion you choose to practice, my hope is that you'll be so connected with your own inner goodness that you'll shine that good light to anyone you meet.