Today I posted a quote to a friend who had commented about guilt. It’s a quote from the movie, “Seven Samurai”. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth seeing. Set in feudal Japan, some samurai get hired by poor villagers – but there is much more to it than that, and I won’t spoil it for you.

The guilt? The guilt was about using open source software projects without contributing somehow, which is pretty much impossible when you’re a one person show with a budget of your bank account.

The quote?

“By protecting others, you save yourself. If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.”

Kambei Shimada (Seven Samurai).

The full context of this is ‘in war’, but war is simply an escalation of conflict, and that conflict is really the deeper context. If we change ‘protecting’ to ‘helping’, where protecting is a specific type of helping.

So by helping others, you help yourself because if you think only of yourself you’ll destroy yourself.

Still not quite right. In the context used, we can say it’s about being selfish, and therefore if you’re selfish you’ll destroy yourself. So let’s try again.

By helping others, you help yourself because if are selfish you will destroy yourself.

That about sums up teamwork, doesn’t it? But not much of our lives these day are about teamwork because everyone has their own goals, some of them conflicting. That’s why nobody calls a committee a team (or vice versa), which is a fun tendril of thought to traipse down.

This is the sort of thing that some were taught growing up in various ways. But what does it have to do with guilt?

Well, if you’re so focused on others that you don’t guard your ability to help others, you will also destroy yourself. There has to be some level of selfish involved to assure one can help others.

And so we wander through life, some of us, just hoping we manage to get that mixture right.

It also seems like a lot of us don’t understand even the surface of this sometimes.