This is a quote that I heard this week while traveling to see clients. It made me stop and put some things into perspective, as I had never heard this or its meaning before and thought it was a noble enough piece worth sharing.
A lot of times people will ask ,“are you doing well?” And usually, the answer – even when it isn’t necessarily the truth – is that you are well. But people always have struggles that others never know about, and probably to be truthful, do not care about. There are things causing fear, creating faults, and causing people to not live by a guiding set of principles that often are never visible to the outside world. But the simple question of “are you doing well” is simply a way to say hello to someone and at least give off the inclination that you care about them.
In this context, and the way it was explained to me, “doing well” has an entirely different approach from the normal salutation. You are doing well because you have spent your time and effort trying to do good. Doing good can be difficult sometimes especially when you are doing good for other people and some of the people perceive that nothing you do is good and can find a lot of fault with you. To do good, you have to have your heart and your mind in the right place. You have to understand and accept what you are doing and why, and be at peace with it. Without these two in tandem, the level of good that you are doing will be insurmountable.
To truly be “doing well,” in my mind, is a place where you have conquered your fears, accepted your faults, believe in yourself and those around you, and have lived by principles that caused you to do good. And not just do good for yourself, but to do good for other people. Once you have done good for others, done a good job at truly knowing and accepting who you are, then you can truly be “doing well.”