Today I went to the grocery store. While there, I allowed someone to go ahead of me a few times while cruising the aisles. I helped a woman find the dishwasher detergent. I smiled at people I encountered in the aisles (although I'm really tired tonight). When I'd finished checking out, I told the checker that I hoped she felt better soon, and I politely thanked the bag boy, smiled at him, and wished him a wonderful weekend. In the parking lot, I politely waited for a car to cross ahead of me, while freezing my ass off. I returned several carts, not just my own, to the cart return. And, while driving in stop and go traffic down the block, I let someone coming from a parking lot out in front of me.
All of things, I think, make me a nice person. But sometimes I wonder... do I do these things because I am a nice person, or because doing these things make me feel like a nice person? How much of it is because somehow, in my childhood, I formed this ideal of myself as "nice person," and now conform to that ideal in order to feel centered in myself? When I answered that survey the other day, and I said that if it was a choice between my death and a loved one, I'd choose death for me immediately, would I, really? Or am I just invested in the idea I would?
Am I, after all, REALLY a nice person?
I think sometimes that we form ideas of ourselves, and then act to conform to those ideas. But are we really, underneath it all, that ideal at all?
There's an episode of Friends where Phoebe is trying to find a truly selfless act. And the problem is -- whenever she does something nice for someone, she feels good about herself. Is there such a thing as a truly selfless act? And is there anything wrong with that?
Of course, one could argue, in the end, that the fact that I'm worrying about whether I'm truly a nice person probably means I actually am. :)