greatest love of all

One evening at a small group gathering, a mother shared with us that she was giving advice to her two college age sons, that one key personality trait to look for when seeking their future soulmate should be "unselfishness," and one of her kids responded, "but Mom, that would be very difficult..".. "Do you know, we are taught to be selfish in this society."

That's quite a profound statement from a quite young man. I was impressed. 

It's easy to say that we live in the most self-gratifying, narcissistic society in human history--just look at all the "you deserve it" ads, be it a new car, a vacation, or a tasty food.. you'd wonder how we constantly battle this commercial-industrial beast that keeps luring us to go out and consume things it makes "for our own good.."

Rather than calling people "selfish," I'll say people are "self-conscious," or "self-centered" by nature. This explains why we feel shy, get embarrassed, or here's an interesting psycho analysis piece I once heard: "In a social gathering where everyone is new, you nervously think everyone else is watching what you say or do, but the truth of the matter is everyone else is all so concerned about what others think of them that the only person who really cares about what you say or do is yourself."  

In that light, people are actually cute exactly because they are so self-centered.

Another observation:

We all like to be complimented, yet we all dare not--or nobody in their right mind would--compliment ourselves. The compliments have to come from others, and they'd better be genuine, otherwise we won't be real happy either.

It seems after so much touted "self-esteem" education, we still long for every bit of recognition and appreciation from our fellow men and women.

Truth be told, by the same nature that we are made to be selfish, we are also made to need one another--for the need of getting appreciation from others, and the need of sharing what we have with others--to make us feel more complete. I remember the documentary movie "Into the Wild" where the young, idealistic lone man traveled all over the country searching for true living but ended up losing his life tragically in the Alaskan wild, wrote down on his notebook the final truth he realized: "Happiness real only when shared." 

Now I can vaguely remember, when I was little, the thought of living all by myself scared me to death--what a sad, lonely state that would be. I also remember I was disturbed when I first saw the sentence "everybody feels lonely sometimes," because it sounded so sad to me. 

But now I don't have those feelings any more--not only can I live and work by myself well, I can even say, as many others do, that I enjoy my time alone quite much.

Sign of maturity, maybe. But, deep down inside, I still wonder if this is a learned temperament molded by the strictures of the environments I went through life with. 

I also recall this saying: "One needs to find his true self first, so he can then voluntarily give it up, and work for the greater good."

I agree with that, except I think sometimes it's really hard to separate the process of finding one's true self from the process of working for the greater good. As a matter of fact, I am almost positive that one needs to have that greater good identified first before he can go out and  find his true little self.

Years ago there was a popular song titled "The Greatest Love of All." The lyrics talks about searching for a hero/role model since childhood but couldn't find one, until finally she realizes she has to depend on herself alone and, "The greatest love of all.. is easy to achieve.. Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all." This is in line with the mainstream mottoes "You are the greatest,"  "You can be anything you want to be," so prevalent in our society they sound like commercial sound bites. Not that such motivational jingles are totally wrong per se, but I just wonder one day when the kids find out that deep down they are not that great, that they just cannot always be what they want to be, no matter how hard they try, do they have a fallback plan? i.e., do they have something bigger than themselves they can admit their limitations to and draw new strength from?

I think that young man mentioned at the beginning of this writing could have.