What is selflessness? I have thought a lot about this and have come to a conclusion. What I have concluded now, had been represented to me as facts, by a teacher of mine few years back. At that time I didn’t believe her but now I am forced to rethink.
Ma’am had said that all human relations are based on selfish love. Be it between lovers, friends, siblings or even between parents and their children. I found it hard to digest.
I wondered how can the affections of a parent towards his/her child be termed as selfish?
Then we were given the reason.
Ma’am told us that we always expect the love we have for someone to be returned to us. We have a tendency to expect it back, and if this expectation fails us we get angry, frustrated etc.. We tend to remind ourselves (or the concerned person) of the last time we had helped them when we want help from them.
While this justification was being explained we raised another question, “then what exactly is selfless love or selflessness?”
We were then told by ma’am that imagine a person X is walking down the stairs and suddenly sees a cockroach upside down struggling hard to turn back itself. X looks at the cockroach and out of kindness(or with some other good emotion in his heart) he turns the poor creature so that it is normal again. The cockroach then goes off (even without a thank you). Did X expect anything from the cockroach?? Or will he expect anything from it in the future? Well no. This is selfless love. The actions of helping the cockroach were done with complete selfless intentions.
This is so true! Isn’t it? It is so often that we get depressed over this selfish love of ours when our expectations are not fulfilled. Ma’am had taught us an important lesson n had tried to tell us that we must try to be selfless in all our deeds.
Maybe at 15 the stark reality dint really sink in but at 21 it has…. and I am still pondering over it.
