[DanaC]

lol good question Wolf.

Oh, and Lj, I agree mostly.

There are times though, when it's less about making you feel good and more about making you feel less bad...by which I mean: sometimes I find myself in a position wherein I can help someone out but in doing so I would really feel the pinch, such as walking through town and being asked for help by someone who is very clearly in genuine need. Not the homeless guy with cool trainers who seems to be doing well enough on his takings, but the waif-like 20 year old sitting on a ragged blanket, shivering in a thin jacket with eyes that are already older than I ever want to be. Everyone's walking past in the cold, their coats drawn up and their focus elsewhere. A couple of quid might really help that kid. But I am almost broke...what do I do?

There are times I have continued walking, got so far and had to turn back. Why? Because I automatically find myself trying to put myself in their shoes. How it must feel to be so invisible in your need? How sharp the wind must be through that little jacket. How cold the world must seem. How long the cold will last. As I hurry off to my bus, thoughts of a warm fire and a cuddle with the dog already in mind, the juxtaposition of these two images is too awful. On occasions like that I have sometimes turned back.

So, why go back and give someone £3 of the £25 I have left to live on for two weeks? It hasn't made me feel 'good', because I'm too aware of the selfishness of my altruism and of the smallness of the difference made. It hasn't even assuaged my guilt, because by directly engaging with the problem I am left with the matter rattling round my head for days, pointing a spotlight at all my excesses and providing an unsettling echo to whatever complaints I make.

I have walked back slowly, before now, still not quite resigned to what I was about to do. Why? Because I am selfish. It matters more to me on the whole that I be able to afford to buy some cigarettes and waste money on a takeaway meal, throw food away that I simply havent got around to cooking, binge on Doctor Who books from Amazon. What am I actually going to spend that couple of quid on? I am not one of life's budgetters, I am no more likely to be sensible with the last £25 in my bank than I am with the first.

This only happens occasionally. Mostly I either give a few coins or keep walking. But sometimes, the immediacy of their need is compelling and disturbing. The gain for me in those cases is less that it makes me feel good to have made a difference, because I know it's a drop in the ocean, rather it's because I 'know' I have done the right thing. I did what my conscience and beliefs suggest is the right thing anyway. That's the selfish gain, that and the momentary connection with that person. It's not the that £2 will make such a difference to that person. It's more that having someone see them and respond might make a difference. It feels wrong to walk past their need as if it wasn't there. Not just wrong at an individual level, wrong at a societal level.

All of that thought is rationale. In reality, my brain function and thought processes are such that I am heavily inclined towards empathy. I don't mean by that, that I am somehow more loving, special or able to read people than anybody else. Just that my instinctive response on encountering other people's stresses and troubles is to try to put myself in their place. This is again a selfish act. At its root is the basic fear that if that were me I'd fail/be unable to cope/break apart. This sits in the same box with the nighttime projections into future grief: a testing process. Predicting 'danger' and planning responses is about as basic as it gets. I have an exaggerated tendency to empathise and I have an exaggerated tendency to future pace danger or harm as a way of 'pre-coping'.

So...yes. Charity in my case is a selfish act. But not necessarily because it makes me feel good.