Greed is one of the ugliest of human characteristics. Selfishness steers us to want more for ourself than for others, more even than for friends and family, people we purport to love. It is probably there in all of us, at least in a latent form. I saw it recently in another, coming from an unexpected quarter at an unexpected time. It filled me with a great sadness. My heart felt hollow and empty. How such greed separates us from each other! It tears a great rift between friends, seemingly unbridgeable.
Perhaps the saddest thing of all about this miserable happenstance is that whatever I see in others, I know is also in myself. How tragic to be shown, by that unfailing mirror of the other, the horror of greediness which must yet reside in me.
Reading the world news, with its unwavering focus on agony, it is clear that all the anguish which we humans inflict on one another is driven by such avarice.
The despair would be unbearable if it were not for the certainty that life maintains a balance. For every act borne of greed, somewhere there is a small act of kindness coming into the world, borne of the love which we humans also hold for one another.
To be human is to have all of this within oneself – the ugliness and the beauty. To acknowledge it all, to accept that it is a part of one, is a difficult yet necessary step on the path to wholeness.
