Living for others is a law of nature: Why doing good matters

Having nothing better to do while I wait for the dirty floodwaters around my house to subside and return to the corrupted river from whence they escaped, I think about what it is like to live in such dire, dark times as the one I’m drowning in. These are the notions that have surfaced out of the cesspool of my mind, like a lotus rising out of the mud.

Water covers about 75 percent of the Earth’s surface. More than half of my body weight is attributable to water. The element of water has been with me since the beginning of my life, and I remember swimming in the water in my mother’s womb. Water is ever-present in the blood, sweat, and tears that limn and define what life and living basically are for me.

Good and bad waters meet in me, in a tenuous balance of opposites, and I at times assume the yellow color of the sediments that adhered to me as I passed through the loess plateaus of my past life, at times adopt the murky, muddy tinge of the lowland river I’ve become.

I am a river; this river is me. Rivers are impelled by their nature, pulled by the urging of gravity, sip-sucked by the siren song of the sea. They have no free will. But men are rivers endowed with both nature and free will. Many rivers run through me, yet I’ve but one boat for sailing. I must choose which river to take to get to the sea at my end. Free will gives us the power to choose. We are free to choose, but we must choose what is right.

Do rivers drink their own water? Do they wash and clean themselves? Unlike men, rivers give and share what they have plenty of. I was once a bad river, for a long time inebriated and intoxicated from drinking too much of my own waters, but I do want to be good again, a giving and forgiving river. I want to be clean and clear once more, like I was when I was a spring in that far and distant spring of my youth. Everyone must make a beginning, no matter how late it is, no matter how lost everything seems to be. I will henceforth assume the color of my choice. I will from this day forward strive to unload all the mud, all the silt, all the bad waters I’ve accumulated over the course of my long and sinful journey. I will no longer be the river that once listlessly flowed from who knew where to who knew where. I want to be good again.

Flowers give off their fragrance; fruits give us their sweetness; trees offer us their shade and their beauty. Do they ask for anything in return? Giving is the foundation of change. Love and kindness, mercy and compassion—these will cost us next to nothing to give. What keeps us from giving them?

Living for others is a law of nature, congruent to the injunction from God for us to love others as we love ourselves. We must strive to be the kind of water that nurtures and nourishes, the river that washes and cleans, not the kind that drowns and kills. If you do a good deed, you will feel quite warm in your inner self, even though there’s a storm and it’s cold outside. Doing good feels good. We must strive to do good for the greatest number of our fellowmen, for as long as we can, for as long as we live.

Antonio Calipjo Go,

Quezon City