The Fog of Self-Centeredness

It is unseasonably warm for this time of year in Maine.  Yesterday we had lots of sunshine and warmth and I had lobster for lunch!  It was delicious.  Now, all I have to do is find some clam chowder somewhere.  The restaurant where I enjoyed my lobster lunch served only “haddock” chowder.  Somewhere there just has to be a place that serves “clam” chowder!

Multiply the “self-centeredness” expressed in the above paragraph to every one of us, and you will have a realistic image of human society.  We are all caught up in this “self-centeredness” and it fogs our vision.  With a focus only on ourselves we cannot know, see, or feel the “others” around us.  It is a common malady from which no one is immune.  As soon as we say we are not “self-centered” we become self-centered.  Was Albert Camus right when he wrote, “To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others?”

Or was George MacDonald right when he wrote, “There are those who never see anything except in relation to themselves, nor that relationship as fancied by themselves; and this being a withering habit of mind, they keep growing drier, and older, and smaller, and deader, the longer they live—thinking less of other people, and more of themselves and their…experience, all the time they go on withering?”

Will my life, with “this withering habit of mind” currently focused on myself (lobster and clam chowder) become drier, older, smaller, and deader—and just go on and on withering?  Self-centeredness fogs our vision for community and without community and concern for others we simply wither away.

John Winthrop provides sound advice, “…we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”  

Our camp site looks out upon Maine’s Audubon’s Scarborough Marsh,

the state's largest salt water marsh.