Doing Good

What might doing good for the world entail?

Perhaps top of the list…

Is the need to redeem oneself,
for we all make mistakes,
small, accidental earthquakes
in someone else’s afternoon.

Ever blame another for what you did?
Ever ignore a plea for compassion
when your personal interest
sat like a jeweled tyrant
on the throne of your mind?

Often…
many layers of ill behavior
have to be excavated,
shards of old motives,
scraps of old fears,
before one arrives
at that great place called…

Doing Good.

And it never begins
with trumpet blasts.
No, it begins with the tiniest gestures:

setting a fallen fork back on a table
as if returning a small star
to the night that lost it,

holding a door for a stranger
so a draft of hope
doesn’t slip out behind them,

rescuing a plant
that droops like a tired traveler
waiting for someone—anyone—
to offer a map to water.

Then doing good grows larger,
becomes a slow‑moving avalanche
of softer moments:

Doing good toward parents,
listening to their stories
unspool like fragile film reels,
catching the light only
when your patience lifts them.

Doing good toward children,
who hand you their futures
in crumpled drawings
of birds that don’t yet know
how high they will fly.

Doing good toward friends,
patching their silences,
pouring coffee into the cracks
where their courage leaks out.

Doing good toward acquaintances,
those passing constellations
we orbit only briefly,
offering a nod, a word,
a kindness so light
it lands like a feather
yet somehow holds the whole day steady.

But then—
the horizon tilts
and the poem swells
into a new, dangerous key.

For what of enemies?

Those who once were your best friends,
whose laughter once lived
in your pockets like lucky coins,
whose absence now echoes
like a cathedral without stained glass.

Doing good here
feels nearly impossible,
like placing a candle
inside a hurricane
and asking it to stay lit,

like handing bread
to the very wolf
that still remembers
your softest places.

Yet somehow,
there comes a moment
when the world pauses,
holding its breath
like a child watching magic.

And you,
against all history,
against all instinct,
offer a kindness
to the one who cracked your sky.

An OMG act,
a breathtaking pivot,
as if sainthood were not granted
but simply chosen
in a single difficult gesture:

the hand extended
toward the one
who once let yours go.

And in that impossible moment,
doing good becomes
a vast, luminous thing,
a lighthouse rising
out of your own chest,
showing every lost person your olive branch,
even the ones who hurt you,
that there is still
a safe way home.,

that place we call…

Peace