Almost everyone wants to be a good person. Why? Well, I don’t know, maybe because being a bad person is… bad. And being a good person is… good? Yeah, that definitely makes sense. But some people don’t know how to be good. They think that you’re born good or bad, or that it’s just too complicated to be good. Well, it is, but it’s at the same time really simple.

What are you talking about? It doesn’t make sense!

Oh, no, it does make sense. It’s easy to be a good person in theory. But it’s impossible to always be a good person. It happens to everyone to have toxic behavior at some point, to lose control, say things they don’t even think, or to stay stuck on a bad idea that our parents/school/any other socializing agent taught us. Because we’re humans: we have flaws, we have weaknesses, we can be manipulated, we’re shaped by our relatives, our friends, the media we follow,… We’re shaped by the society we live in.

But then, how to be a good person?

First of all: what’s a good person?

It’s probably the most subjective thing on earth, and, besides, who am I to decide what’s a good person? I may be nobody, but maybe I can still give a good definition of the concept of “good person”. I think that the most objective way to describe a good person would be:

“A good person is a person who genuinely respects everything”

Short, but efficient. And I’m sure you agree with me on that one: respect is good.

Okay, but now: what do you mean by “respect everything”?

Well, respect comes from “respectus” in Latin. To me, etymology is really important to understand the true meaning of a word, as it can evolve with time. The definition can be a bit different (or the word can take different meanings), but the root will still stay the same. Respecterus means “regard, consideration” but also “ a looking at” (and thus looking back and learn from the past)