Selflessness: One Step At a Time

He had been a British Army officer who served in India and Burma during World War II, a company director, and an avid motorcyclist. And at the age of ninety-nine, he became famous. His full name was Captain Sir Thomas Moore. The world called him “Captain Tom.” 

It was April 2020, and the world was just beginning to grapple with Covid and the toll it would take. Captain Tom wanted to support the National Health Service (NHS) and thank them for all they had done and would be doing. Having been advised by his nurse to stay active and encouraged by his family, he decided to hold a fundraiser. His goal was to raise £1,000 by using his walking frame to walk one hundred laps in his garden, fifty yards at a time, before his 100th birthday, which would occur in a few weeks. 

The images of Captain Tom in suit and tie, medals pinned to his chest, smiling as he leaned into his walking frame and walked back and forth in the garden touched millions of people. In the first day of posting the fundraiser, the £1,000 goal had been reached. So it was raised to £5,000. Later to £500,000. 

Donations poured in from all over the world. Delighted by people's generosity, Captain Tom thanked them on Twitter. On his birthday, at the end of the twenty-four-day fundraising campaign, one-and-a-half million people had donated over £32,000,000. 

Captain Tom was personally knighted by Queen Elizabeth in a special ceremony held outdoors at Windsor Castle as Covid surged. As the weeks passed and he received a dizzying array of accolades, Captain Tom remained humbled by all the attention.

Fast forward to today. Instead of seeing another Captain Tom in various media, we see people increasingly focused on exercising their individual rights and personal freedom. What others want is irrelevant. It's the age of influencers, self-promotion, and images going viral. 

Stroll through a park or visit a restaurant and you'll see groups of people lounging on the grass or sitting at tables, almost all of them peering at their smartphones. Drop in on a family in a comfortable home in the evening and you'll find family members all in their own rooms watching TV, playing games on their computers, or scrolling on their smartphones. Ask people to wear a face mask for the sake of those who are at risk during a pandemic and you'll run the risk of being met with cries of individual rights. 

People want to say and do what they want, when they want, and how they want.

That's one of the reasons there's so much anger today. We’re seeing more and more people, who upon hearing “No,” lose it, because "no" means they can't do what they want: go into a store without a face mask, ignore safety precautions on an airplane, or pull into a parking spot in a crowded lot before an already waiting driver. The desire to do something is so strong that the fact that others may be inconvenienced or even harmed as a result of one's selfish fixations is not considered. It's as if people today take the "no" from a stranger as seriously as their ancient ancestors viewed that stranger with the spear. 

Everything becomes personal as people feel more stressed and more entitled. Because things are not going as hoped for, people overreact. After calming down, they may sincerely say, "This is not me. This isn't who I am!" 

But for those moments, that is exactly who they were. They had shut themselves off from others to such a degree that they completely ignored what others were experiencing and ignored the suffering they were causing others. And completely unaware of the suffering they were causing themselves, which could be anything from being fined and put on an airline's no-fly list to causing an accident and getting arrested. And that's in this life.

Throwing a tantrum and yelling at another person could turn a neutral relationship or even an affinity into an enmity. Or we might have just made a long-standing bad karmic relationship even worse. And if we think what happened now was upsetting, it will be even more so in the future.

Why do we, normally sane and rational people, do this?

Often we lose it because we’re feeling overwhelmed. Running late, we just need to pick up a few things at the store and we don't want to keep looking for a parking space or deal with a face mask once we finally park our car and go into the store. Maybe we get off the first flight of our trip and hear that our second flight is canceled, and we have no idea where our luggage is. In each of these scenarios, our plans hit a serious snag. Exasperated, we take it out on the store manager, the airline personnel, the other drivers in the parking lot, or the person telling us “no.” 

Something like this happened recently to a state park visitor. The man began yelling at a young park worker who was clearly upset and had no idea what to do. A park supervisor came over, politely led the man into an unoccupied office, and closed the door. To the supervisor’s surprise, the man sat down and burst into tears. 

Handing the man a tissue, the dumbfounded supervisor waited for him to regain control and then asked why he was so distressed. The man explained that he had booked the wrong date for the long-planned overnight stay and didn’t know how to break the news to his family. Fortunately, the supervisor found a place for the family to stay that night. The man later wrote a letter of appreciation, and apology.

Embarrassed at having to admit his mistake, chagrined at disappointing his wife and children, not knowing how to fix his problem, probably calling himself an idiot for making such a dumb mistake, the man did what many of us end up doing these days: get upset with the person who is giving us bad news. 

At times like this, all we’re thinking about is our own feelings. It’s hard to peer through our rage and suffering to see that we’re now causing someone else’s suffering. Much less to care about it.

What to do? 

Understand that we’re already primed for selfishness because the unfortunate person giving us the bad news is often a stranger. And as discussed in an earlier talk, strangers are unknown commodities. There’s no telling what they’ll do. So it’s not surprising that people can lose their temper when a stranger is delivering bad news. Plus, since it is a stranger, we’ll probably never have to see them again. So we figure it doesn’t matter how we react.

But it does.

To learn how not to react with hostility when a stranger is telling us something we don’t want to hear, we need to start disassembling the barrier between that stranger and us. To do this, we can see what works for us. In our state park example, the man might have imagined how he would act if one of his own children were the worker. Visualizing his child rather than a stranger, he hopefully would have had a better chance of controlling his anger. The sooner he caught it rising, the sooner he would calm down.  

By breaking down the barriers between ourselves and strangers, we’ll gradually progress from not wanting to make an already bad situation worse to not wanting to upset others to wanting others to be happy. We’ll move from selfishness to selflessness, from demanding respect to treating others with respect. 

Acting from selflessness, we’ll find it easier to forgive the other person for perceived or real offenses. We’ll have stopped focussing on our own needs and wishes, and begun to consider those of the other person. In the instance of our state park visitor, forgiveness should have been easy. If the man had not been so upset over his booking error, he could have seen that the park worker was simply delivering the bad news. There was actually nothing to forgive the young worker for. But even if there had been something, perhaps what was taken as the failure of the young worker to sympathize with a hotel-less visitor, forgiveness on the visitor’s part might have saved all involved considerable upset. 

Is all this challenging to accomplish? Of course. All the good stuff is. I think it safe to say that at the age of ninety-nine, even the admirable Captain Tom found walking laps in his garden challenging. 

In 2018, he was treated for a broken hip, broken rib, punctured lung, and other injuries following a fall. He was still recovering from these in 2020, hence the walking frame. And yet, there he was, quietly determined to fulfill his pledge, doggedly traversing the garden one step after the other to raise money for the NHS workers. 

After the first goal, the second one, and the ones that followed were met along with his goal of 100 laps, he could have said, “Done!” and enjoyed all the congratulations and accolades. But he kept going. More laps could mean more donations. More donations would mean more help for other people. That was more important than sitting back and enjoying all the attention he was garnering. Wanting to do a small kindness, he had stumbled upon a veritable goldmine of kindness. A treasure trove of selflessness.

What he did was incredible. At the same time, so humble. Technically, all he did was walk in his garden. Nothing amazing there.

But it was how he did it. 

There was nothing showy. Looking at his photo, we see a man who could be our grandfather dressed for our annual family get-together. Upright and well-dressed, looking very much the retired army officer from the “greatest generation.” Blue suit with three brass buttons, striped tie (regimental?), white hair, neatly trimmed mustache, and glasses. 

Nothing special. 

Everything special. 

He was what most would call an ordinary man. But he was doing something extraordinary. With humility (and surely a twinkle in his eye), he touched millions of people. And one-and-a-half million of them donated in appreciation to those who dedicate their lives to the well-being of others.

Selflessness does not have to be grandiose to move or help others. It just needs to be sincere. To be genuine. It arises when we see a problem and come up with a solution that considers our abilities and utilizes our skills. If we do all this well enough, one day, we too may earn the right to have a twinkle in our eye and be worthy of the respect of all who know us.

We have a responsibility to act on our own

and not wait for instructions on what to do.

While it can be tempting to leave everything up to someone else, especially someone who is knowledgeable and whom we respect, we still remain responsible for our own behavior. And it is our responsibility to do what is right even when initially we feel unsure just what right is.

As long as we remain part of this world, it is our responsibility to be informed. To understand the phenomena that we interact with. And then apply the ethical principles that we have learned to decide whether or not to do something. And, if yes, then how best to proceed.

This is why we study and examine those principles—to be able to use fundamental truths (for example, do no harm) in new situations. But if we remain uninformed, we will remain oblivious to the harm we perpetrate. So we cannot wait for someone to hand us instructions for every situation we encounter.

We need to educate ourselves and determine how best to act.