A selfish emotion

On yet another regular morning, we walked out on the roadside with our adorable little German shepherd, taking him out for his everyday morning stroll. A lot of strays on the large open ground nearby barked at him and my mother just shooed them away with a small cane. She loved the thing a lot. More than a lot of other things. She protected it, from all the unknowns outside. The shepherd was now very much a part of her world of giving.

The strays had all been out in a deadly night's cold and rain without a shelter, some of them wounded, some hungry and probably a few that were just living their last day. It just so happened that they did not happen to be a part of someone's world of love and giving, someone like my mom's, by virtue of just unfortunate coincidence.

Blocks away, lived the small girl who loved her collection of teddy bears, all so neatly arranged in her little cupboard. On a day when one of the dolls got messed up in water, and its eyes got damaged and fell out, it tore her heart a tad bit and she wept a little.

And then there were all of us regular folks. Those that loved our families, felt reassured with every word of love and care. We'd sway with joy and burn with pain with every motion that passed us through, in our very own circle of people. A lot would cherish every minute manifestation of intellectual progress of their regular unexceptional children, somehow wanting to be reassured that they are special and unique in their own ways, in a world of 6 billion confused folk, whose acts at the end of the day are nothing but tripe and blips in an infinite universe that yearn for existence with the excuse of an irrational sense of self-importance. Aided with the burden of an unexceptional speck of a mediocre existence, we'd all bust a hame about the people in our lives, because end of the day, that is all we had.

Meanwhile, there were the stray folk outside too. Those whose lives damn well would get a tad lot better with a little care that we had to offer outside our own little sphere. In fact, some could actually manage to survive.

And, so is the nature of love. An elaborate design in a box inhabited by people in our own worlds, those that have come together by accidents. With all its grand illusions of true 'giving' and 'care', there is a lot of energy that recirculates within the box, our sphere of people who we spend our lives for. The inhabitants were dependent on and attached to one another, expecting no great standards of performance, moral values or excellence. The biggest purpose it served is to basically make everyone's craving for social companionship and care, satiated to various degrees. A sense of reciprocation or a need for possession, with just either of these at play, the design would sustain. A prescription handed down by nature itself down the line, a remarkably successful survival technique, that helps one shut the box and focus on whatever is inside. A grand illusion, mutual give-and-take, and completely no damn to everything else.

And thus we lived in shut doors, locking our possessions, building securities, eliminating liabilities, all towards the apparent betterment of the inhabitants of our own boxes, because we 'sought' love. We 'gave' love too, but only apparently so because the basis of the emotion is just not unbiased giving. It is a survival mechanism. A family inside your own little cupboard box of teddy bears, and you can damn well spend your 80 years of life, without really having to think out-of-the-box.

We'd be humane, but only selectively so. We'd love, but only selectively so. Who became part of our own little boxes were often defined by a sequence of accidents, our own prejudices and tilted views of the world that appealed to our own selves. But strangely so, it reaches the threshold when we prepare ourselves to shut ourselves from the inconvenient strays out there. And then, it is all about the box.

None of this is intended to be a calling for charity. One cannot deny that love itself exists, no matter whatever shallow forms it exists in. And folk expend a lot of energy in its name. This is all merely yet another idle reflection on what truly is, a selfish emotion, that we all crave to whatever degree. 

For what it is worth, it does help a few survive, in their own little boxes. Only thing to perhaps know and understand, is to never exaggerate that emotion to an illusion of unconditional giving, for there exists no such thing.