What is good? (#1040)

I have been trying to encapsulate what good is since I first thought about why it was what I wanted to be. Some of you may find this odd, but since I was 6 years old I made the choice to be good over everything else. Yes, I chose to be a good person at that time. I remember playing on the floor and thinking about good and how it made me feel. Granted that I was very young and quite limited in what I could define as good but feeling what I knew about good was real. I was no different than many others of my time, starting out in life in the mid 1950's. America had, within a generation, just come out of the Great Depression and World War II. It was a time when large families were commonplace. Our family had 8 children and many times our acquaintances had even more children than that. I was fortunate that I was the third child, third boy as well, in a tightly spaced age sequence because I got to see how life was going to be for me within a few years. I gained by watching my older brothers and developed a lot of my abilities from their actions. I can honestly say that my older brothers played the greatest role for me in how I was to become. They did not know this at the time but as we got older I was able to convey to one and I am still able to convey to the other, my deep appreciation. However all of this is to lead into my point about good. The struggles of my young life allowed me to see the varied differences of good and bad. The bad never had any type of feeling to it that satisfied anything within me. I knew, even back then that bad was not right and it only hurt those it happened to. Which left me with good. Good always made me feel like I was special and worthy. Especially the worthy part since our lives were hard, the feeling of not being worthy was a constant affliction. But deep within me I knew that by being good I could escape unworthiness and live in a world where my head was held upright and not with head bent over, hiding my eyes from the world so that no one could see into the window of my embarrassed soul.