Emerson, Session 3: You Don't Have to Be Good
We are doomed to a life of futile searching until we understand our true nature.
The late great American poet Mary Oliver wrote of Emerson, “I think of him whenever I set to work on something worthy.” In one of her most “worthy” and evocative poems, “Wild Geese,” Oliver expresses Emersonian ideas:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
There, in a nutshell, is Emerson’s message in his essay “Spiritual Laws.”
“You do not have to be good,” Emerson tells us repeatedly. Trying to be good is a barrier. As we have explored many times in Mindset Shifts U, willpower is overrated. To be good, you have to be willing to be good. A willingness to be good starts with understanding who you really are. Importantly, as we explored in our earlier Emerson sessions, who we are is not a sanitized version of our ego. There is “no kernel of nourishing corn” that will come from that version of our self. We are doomed to a life of futile searching until we understand our true nature.