Rethinking Selfishness

When we think we know all there is to know, it is an indication that boundaries need to be challenged...

I fell out of communication with a dear friend due to some misunderstanding at what I considered a very difficult period in my life. For perspective, the hardest parts were about three months in total but we stopped speaking for almost six to seven months after.

After one of my posts on moving on, I decided to walk my talk, so I rang her line. She picked up on the second ring and I must say, that surprised me because I expected her not to answer the phone as I was just calling to prove that I could be a bigger person not because I was ready to mend the relationship. In fact, I had proposed to watch the relationship slide down the drain of ruin.

We were on the phone for roughly three hours just hashing out issues and filing each other in on all the developments we’ve missed since we fell out of touch. I left that conversation with a different perspective on selfishness. It turned out that both of us were at a challenging phase of our lives in that period, we were facing novel developments in our lives that left us out of our depths. Lots of the words and actions we reacted to were nothing more than our reactions to the adjustments we had to make in our lives at the time.

Fast forward to some days after, I was reading a book about unlikely people who were starting to fall in love with each other. The lover boy in this story is a recluse, not used to smiling, grumpy, and just overall rude and of course, the heroine is all sunshine and rainbows (tell me again about opposites attracting). In one of the scenes she sat next to him but he moved away, she immediately thought to herself that he was being typical again, rude, grumpy, and unkind.

It turns out that he moved away because he did not know what to do with affection. He had never been comforted by people he sought comfort from, he ran away from home at a very young age and was constantly in fear of being found out because he has certain powers that must stay hidden. For short, he had led a very lonely life devoid of affection and reliance on others.

When we think of selfishness, we think of blatant acts of inconsideration for others. We are even at times, more concerned with the consistent display of a person’s lack of generosity. For the longest time, my definition of selfishness has been a person who is averse to sharing their possession with others in need or just based on request, inconsiderate of others and just self-absorbed. But in all my thinking, I have been focused on overt acts and not the preceding rationality.

My focus in this post, however, is on the subconscious display of selfishness, the type we are not even aware we are exhibiting because it is so innocuous that it happens to the best of us. We mean well but we can’t help but be focused on how we are feeling at the time we form our opinions.

This is in the sense that we do not even realize that we are acting selfishly because we organize our perception based on what we are experiencing and not because we’ve put ourselves in the shoes of another. It is such that in reaching our decision on how to act towards a person, we acquire no consideration of what they might also be tackling. I know this is also a common interpretation in itself but I am saying it is often overlooked.

Another way to perceive this distinction is how we interpret selflessness. Selflessness is often juxtaposed with kindness which some define as acting generously to a person who is in no capacity to reciprocate. I think kindness is an action born out of the trait of selflessness.

We are inherently unable to be kind if we cannot come outside our internal dealings. It even takes an extraordinary presence of mind to relate with people based on what they may be going through which is the concentration of this post.

Think of the many times you have acted towards a person based on your interpretation of their action. I am not saying it is often wrong, I am just saying it may also be inaccurate and coloured. Moreso, the fact that we may be generously disposed to sharing with others physical or material things does not mean we cannot be emotionally selfish.

To summarize, you can be selfish and generous at the same time because it is easier to give things one has formed detachment from. It is in the sharing of our attachments that we truly can gauge our selflessness.

Xoxo,

Dcconoisseur.