What is goodwill, aside from the bland phrase that we use at Christmas? Interesting, isn’t it, that we use it at Christmas and almost never again during the rest of the year. Surely the word is more about ‘will’ than we normally allow? Surely ‘will’ and ‘good’ bear equal importance in that word? Yet normally, like ‘peace’, it has a fairly insipid connotation.
When you re-structure the word as the will-to-good, how much
more powerful it becomes in an instant.
The will-to-good – now there’s an ideal to make you think. If there were more will-to-good throughout the world today,
‘peace’ would follow automatically. So
now we have:
the will-to-good; and
Goodwill
is love-in-action; and
Love is
goodwill-in-action
Is your individual goodwill worth anything on World Goodwill
Day, or any other day of the year? Only
this week I saw a snippet from the Dalai Lama on a friend’s Facebook page. It said “If you think you are too small to
make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”
In a world where everything is measured in huge numbers – global
population, the bail-out for Cyprus;
numbers so vast that we imagine winning a mere £1 million as a pittance
– it is easy to convince ourselves that our widow’s mite, the two penn’orth we
can contribute to well-being in this planet, is negligible.
But my view on this is that we are like the hairs on a gecko’s feet. It can climb walls, not because its feet are
sticky, but because each is covered with thousands of microscopic hairs. Each hair only makes an infinitesimally
insignificant amount of contact with the wall, but combined with all the other
hairs, the total makes for powerful adhesion.
That’s how an idea or an ideal grows and becomes a way of
life. Each of us contributes our
miniscule amount of goodwill to society; but that, when added to that which
already exists, enables the human family
to climb towards a fairer, more tolerant and compassionate future for the whole
of the planet.
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