He sat at the table with a coffee gone cold and a cigarette burned down to its last inch. The idea had come to him in the night, as most ideas do, half-dreamt and tangled with other thoughts he couldn’t remember. Was it selfish to want to help people? He thought about it now, turning it over like a coin, feeling its weight. It was a damned thing, this urge to do good. And it was a damned thing to think too much about it.
The trouble with people is that they ruin things. They ruin the earth, they ruin love, they ruin themselves. You give a man a fine house, and he will let it rot. You give him a kind word, and he will turn it against you when the time comes. Humanity, if it was to be summed up in a phrase, was a long, slow act of self-sabotage. And yet, against all reason, men still helped each other. Why? Was it some noble instinct, buried deep in the bones? Or was it only vanity, dressed up in good intentions?
He thought of the men he had known, the ones who had given their last coin to a beggar and the ones who had turned away. The ones who had spent their lives healing the sick, feeding the poor, teaching the lost. Were they better men? Or did they only enjoy feeling like better men? If a man pulls another from the river, does he do it for the drowning man, or does he do it to feel the strength in his own arms? The water is cold either way, and the man may jump in again tomorrow.
He took a sip of the coffee, now bitter and wrong. He thought about what it meant to help someone in a life where everyone was bound for ruin anyway. Maybe it was like patching a hole in a boat that was already sinking. It would sink, yes. But maybe, for a time, it would float a little longer. Maybe that was the point. Maybe that was enough.
He stubbed out the cigarette. He decided it did not matter whether kindness was selfish. What mattered was whether it was done. He stood, stretched, and left a few coins on the table. The waiter would take them, and they would mean something to him, or they wouldn’t. Either way, the gesture was made. And that, in the end, was all there was.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.