Goodness?

By Samir Selmanovic (Originally published in Goodness, May 1, 2025)

Goodness is a big word.

Goodness is not merely complicated. Goodness is complex. And there's a vast difference between the two.

A car, for example, is complicated. We can develop a finite number of rules and steps for creating one. There are a finite number of parts, all named and all in specs. Trained humans can take it apart and put it back together.

Garden, on the other hand, is complex. We have no known finite list of ingredients, no names for all the processes happening, and no specs. No science, religion, or even magic can ever hope to take apart even one leaf and put it back together.

Sometimes, goodness is like a car. Cause and effect are clear, and you know what to do. Fill up the gas tank and drive. When it breaks down or you have an accident, fix it. We can control cars.

But most of the time, and in ways that really matter, goodness is like a garden. We are never in control of a garden. It has a life of its own.

And yet, even though we cannot control a garden, we know how to care for it. There's pruning, fertilizing, and weeding. There are frosts, droughts, and dormancy periods. There are seasons tied to the hurling of our planet through the cosmos. There are losses, harvests, endings, and beginnings. We learn to nourish it. We learn to protect it. We learn to wait. To let go. All the while, we are out of control.

When we treat goodness merely as a complicated problem to solve, our caring for goodness can quickly turn bad, exhausting, and sometimes tragic. We overestimate our powers and force our understanding. When that fails, we pretend to be in control. And when that fails, we embrace a fantasy that someday we will turn the complexity we cannot control into something complicated that we will eventually control.

We need a better story of what being good means.

There are ways to transform ourselves and our world that are easier and, therefore, possible, as well as joyful and, thus, sustainable.

Complex does not have to be complicated. There's particular simplicity associated with being a gardener. In many ways, the complexity of a garden is inversely related to what it requires to care for it. Enjoy it, fertilize it, prune it, enjoy it, weed it, enjoy it, let it go dormant, enjoy it, harvest it, enjoy it, fertilize it…

Joy plus simple, obvious daily actions, big and small, difficult and easy, is all we need to do.

Goodness is something larger than any one of us can control. We simply participate in it.

The human mind is designed for simplicity; we are wired to look for solutions we can do with ease. Our general pattern is to simplify. That is how we have been deciding, getting things done, and evolving.

Nowadays, everywhere we turn, we are faced with warnings about all the ways we can go wrong with easy solutions. In the prescient words of American journalist HL Mencken, we are told, "For every problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Indeed, we cannot merely simplify our problems by shrinking them to what we already know.

We have discovered that a whole slew of biases run our lives. They have helped us survive for thousands of years. Times have changed; the biases that helped us survive are problematic now, and the stakes are much higher. Now, we must stop, think, question our intuition, think again, wait, and ask questions we avoid asking. That's all good; we all need to engage in the sometimes tedious and often necessary work of rechecking our perceptions and recalibrating our intuitions. Yet, an arms race with complexity will not succeed.

Humans need simplicity not only to survive but also to feel alive. Not any simplicity, but rather–and this matters immensely—the radical simplicity of participating in something greater than ourselves.

Science tells us that the rules in complex systems can be unexpectedly simple. Instead of trying to predict and control the future, we honor past lessons, examine present patterns, and allow ourselves to be engaged by something other than our own stories and thoughts.

We live in an era when everything changes everywhere and all at once. Even if we see change as exciting, the more we think about it, the more overwhelmed we become by our lack of control. Since this morning, our relational, professional, and planetary circumstances have already shifted. Tomorrow, we will wake up in a different world, and the person we see in the mirror will not be the same.

We are not change makers, change agents, or game changers. Those are the names we give ourselves as we play adult versions of the game of pretending.

We don't know, and when we don't know, we fear. Some nights, anxiety — a fear of being even more afraid — sits on our chests. Some days, it locks us in and does not let us walk out into the world. We realize, most often subconsciously, that rather than observing, instigating, or managing change, we are inhabiting change. There is no escape from our own lives. And since there's no escape, we may as well have compassion for ourselves and each other and learn to survive and delight in our lives together.

Yes, goodness is beyond our control.

But not beyond our participation.

When we let ourselves inhabit the goodness that holds us all, we find ourselves at the frontier of our freedom to participate in it or not.

When we participate, we continually arrive at the moments of undoing who we have been, in contact with the forces we don't understand, inviting us to a conversation we don't yet know how to have.

Goodness is oozing with hope.

Samir

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