by Darren Horton

Created on: January 08, 2011   Last Updated: April 08, 2011

Extreme selfishness - I’d go so far as to say that human evolution is entirely dependant upon it. 

Without selfishness, people would otherwise find themselves wasting their lives away, helping old ladies cross the road and other such nonsense.  Nothing would get invented; there’d be no cures; books wouldn’t be written and movies wouldn’t be made.  I have my own theory: Survival of the most selfish.  This is the mantra by which I now live my life.  

Imagine my panic, when I awoke one morning with an entirely different mindset.  Instead of wanting people to fail miserably in everything they did, I actually wanted them to succeed and I had an alien urge to help them.  It was horrible.  I couldn’t even walk down the street without offering my assistance.

I went to the Doctor but he didn’t consider my uncharacteristic charitableness to be an illness.  Apparently, it was a good thing.  He sent me away without a prescription so I took another day off work and spent the morning in bed, hoping to sleep it off.  When I awoke, the first thing I did was run outside to help an old man who was shovelling snow from his driveway.  I snatched the shovel from his hands and cleared his driveway in a righteous frenzy.  Then I offered to polish his car.

Events began to whirlwind out of control.  I gave away all the money in my wallet to a homeless beggar that slept beneath the railway-bridge.  Then I withdrew my cash-limit from a hole-in-the-wall and gave that away too.  I even gave my shoes away and walked home through the snow in my socks. 

When I got home I emptied my cupboards of food and redistributed it among the elder residents of the village.  I noted some of them were snowed-in and probably hadn’t left their homes since the blizzard began, so I returned post-haste with a shovel and cleared their paths of snow.

Between journeys from my home to whomever I was helping, I helped push out fourteen spinning vehicles, took a snowball full in the face and laughed it off and carried an old lady through a snow-drift to her front door.

With each and every turn of kindness my physical well-being increased and shone through my face like a beacon of righteous charitableness.  People noticed.  They approached me to ask for my assistance in a variety of matters and I refused none of them in their requests.

Night fell.  I returned

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