Selfless deed anyone?

“Believing or teaching that the chief motives of human action are derived from love of self.”

Are you thinking of what this defines ? No i am not one of those quiz masters or anyone who wants to play guessing games with you. “Still not figured it out? Ahh!! okay here s another clue…” none of those things. Frankly i find it really insulting. Well they know you don’t know and still go on asking you to figure it out. Why should my ignorance feed another person’s ego huh!!! Okay i guess i have evaded the definition for 4 lines so much for i- am- no- quiz master. The sentence above defines SELFISH.

Honestly did you think that this idea was bad until you came to know that this was the meaning of selfish? Did your face make all geometrical angles and did you go all like ” good heavens , that is so bad” when u read that sentence?If you did not then the reason I reckon is because its true.If you are asking ” Are u suggesting miss that we are selfish?” then again “yes, I am.”. The degree of right and wrong of any idea to a great extent belongs to the self.But you never really know what the person is thinking ,primarily because he is afraid of what the world might think of him. This is perfectly true in all of us. You don’t want to look like the only geek who believes in some theory which the entire world thinks is hideous.

Why is it so? Why are we all selfish? There is really no explanation for why it is ,cause it is inane. Can we point out one action of us that is not derived from the love of self? Everything you do has you involved in it . You have a role to play in the result. You are a variable in the equation whether you like it or not.Every selfless deed we think we are doing is in fact in a small way selfish.We want to make a difference. WE want to break away from the shackles of mundane life where we are of no help to anybody. WE want to bring a smile to people’s lives. WE want to contribute a little something that we can to the rest of the world. That is laudable but is not quite selfless. The reason being at the end of the day it makes you happy. You decide to do something that will help YOU get out of a certain kind of lifestyle and help you get some peace. Now why is this wrong?? It is not. Simply because it is derived form the love of self? So what of it did? You did end up bringing a smile to other people’s lives. You did try and make lives of not so privileged people better.

We might argue that deeds by our national and international heroes are selfless? But is it really? When Mahatma Gandhi decided to wear just a dhoti because he could not see his countrymen in poverty , he did something he believed in. It coincided with his thoughts and beliefs.
Being Selfless does not have to be the virtue or the reason why people like him are great souls. It is because of their principles and the fact that they were courageous enough to go to any extents to do what they believed in.That makes them great.

So what is being selfish then? Where do you demarcate the line where it falls in to being downright horrible? I think that is where you are living in self concocted world thinking every action even if it does not benefit you should not benefit anyone else more than you. That is selfish in a bad connotation or lets say in the real sense of the word that we believe in. So that’s more of what you don’t want others to have than what you want for yourself. This contradicts what we think being selfish is all about and in a weird way says that anything that is really not good for you is maybe not good at all.

Many times we ask ourselves are we being too self centered? And sometimes the answer might be a YES.This yes does not have to mean we are some kind of a monster who is overflowing with ego. It just means we are normal. As long as our sole objective in life is to be happy i don’t think there is anything wrong in being selfish .It is only going to take us a step forward in our journey towards happiness. By being selfish , by wanting things that make you feel happy in a wholesome way, a way that does not involve tripping the other person from the race, a way that makes you feel happy when you go to sleep every night, a way that makes you remember the face of the kid with whom you spent the day in the orphanage and realise that you just tasted heaven.If that action was derived from love of self, is it really so bad?

So selfless deed anyone??