War and Peace

I have just recently began reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. I know that most of you who know me are probably wondering how I am just now getting around to reading this. Yes, I do love classical books but there are just so many it would take a lifetime to read them all, and if you have ever seen War and Peace in print you would understand how daunting it appears.
As I have been slowly making my way into the book I stumbled across this quote: "We don't love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them." It stikes me how true this statement is. The truth of this statement, and the guilt that is stapled to it, has followed me around for the last week like a stray cat. A very nasty stray cat, not the cute and cuddly kind, perhaps this stray cat even has mange. Its one of those reality crashing truths, the ones you never want to realize. You tell yourself, "Well I am really not that way at all." Then you get completely honest...ok well... not completely, but you allow reality to run in under the cracks of the door of your self image and think "...ok so maybe I have done that just a few times."
To face the facts of how most people, short of sainthood, really are are grim. We volunteer, because we have to due to some circumstance, or we do it to feel better about ourselves. Is selflessness even possible? Are we, as imperfect creations, able to proform an act out of complete and total selflessness? It makes me wonder. The good things we have done for others are some of the first things to come to mind when we think of the individual, as opposed to all the things they may have done for us. I have wonderful and amazing friends, who I know, upon reflection from this new point of view have done wonderful things for me out of love. I want to learn how to remember and how to love them more for those times they have given to me; as opposed to seeing them with only the value of things I have done for them. I do think of things people have done for me and remember those things, but like everyone I do not hold those moments at high ranking in my memory as compaired to when I have given of myself. Be honest with yourself and honest with the people in your life. Let's learn to appriciate and love others as much as we appriciate and love ourselves.