Mother Theresa be Damned

There's a story of an old woman who lived alone until the day she died. Friends came and went as they pleased and she was close with her family, but she had never married, so after they left, the house was empty. She lived a full life, experiencing incredible things and going to incredible places. When she was only 18, she made the decision not to get married because the love of her life was taken away from her to die in World War II occupied France. She never went back on that promise to herself.

There's something noble about inflexibility, but it also makes me wonder how viable it is. Can you imagine sticking to a plan your made when you were 18? Can you even remember the plans and promises you made when you were 18?

Noble choices often have no extrinsic value. In fact, they usually hinder our opportunity for potential gain. Making the "right" choice is usually one of sacrifice. Of course, it seems the only times we see these decisions being made are during movies and in books. A chivalrous hero upholding some arbitrary code of existence that has fallen out of practice in exchange for the base ways of the day. So then, nobility seems to be strict adherence to an outmoded moral code, a truth that has gone out of fashion.

But is what the woman did really that noble? She's preserving the memory of the man she loved, but is there any inherent worth in the way she's going about it? Perhaps its the importance we place on finding a partner in life that frustrates the situation. Perhaps we cannot see ourselves doing the same thing - ending a quest for love because you've already found it and lost it. If her love had just moved away or decided to break up with her. Would we still consider her decision to stop looking for love once she found it noble?

The underlying question is one of why we give. Noble acts are defined by giving something up in exchange for an intangible - when a city worker found a sack with $65,000 in it last week, it made the news because she returned it (it had fallen off a bank truck) without even thinking about keeping it. It was the right thing to do. She traded monetary gain for something. But what is that something? Karma? A good feeling? The frustrating thing for most when dealing with the noble act, is that the gain is something intrinsic. It is something that that woman will never be able to put into words for another human being. She can't wear it or drive it or live in it or flaunt it, but she has it, and she knows what it is.

I think lately, I've been dying to know what it is.