Wise Selfishness

 “Foolish selfishness means you just think only of yourself, don’t care about others, bully others, exploit others. In fact, taking care of others, helping others, ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life. So that is what I call wise selfishness.”   

             - Dalai Lama: The Book of Joy, p. 48

 

Between my Covid isolation and the European trip, it had been some five weeks since I got to play piano at the Jewish Home for the Aged. I was so happy to see all of my regulars there. Being “there” has a different meaning when playing for a population in their 80’s and 90’s, so the simple act of seeing their lovely faces was already enough. And went on from there into the multiple worlds that music can carry us to, all the different emotions that a variety of scales and tempos and meters and harmonies and styles and past associations can evoke. Traveling through Joplin rags, Strauss waltzes, Sousa marches, Bach fugues, Mozart’s piano concertos, Jerome Kern and Gershwin tunes and yet more, we passed yet another delightful hour sharing the beauty, solace, excitement and comfort that music can bring. 16 years now of these marvelous connections, the people changing, but the feeling always the same.

 

Walking out back to my car, I thought to myself how much I need this. As much, if not more, than the people I’m playing for. From the outside, it might look like a mitzvah—“a good deed done from religious duty”— or generosity, giving freely of myself to people in need without a penny in return or community service. But from another point of view, it can be seen as pure selfishness, an ongoing chance to practice piano with people in the room and the deep pleasure it gives to me knowing they’re enjoying it. 

 

Reading through “The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World,” a marvelous document of conversations between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, I found this quote above that well describes my sensation: “Wise selfishness.” I’m not doing this to be self-consciously helpful or fulfilling any moral obligations or wanting pats on the back and equally, not doing this simply because it brings me so much pleasure. There simply is no gap between my pleasure and the residents’— it’s just something that brings happiness to all of us, with that extra little kick of feeling that all my long hours devoted to expressing myself through music is as useful to others as it is to me.

 

Wise selfishness. May there be more of it for all of us!