There is no freedom so great, no happiness so large, so wide reaching, as the giving of self in service. It is the hero who gives himself. If he did not give himself utterly, there would be no heroism in it. It is the giving which is heroic.
And so it is with love. Where there is questioning about it — not uncertainty because uncertainty is always very natural in these things; one wishes to be sure — but where there is a question about the values involved, where there is a selfish searching of "what I want," there is no heroism, no love, no self-giving. There is not the ghost of a shadow of a chance there for the god-like, heroic quality of self-renunciation.
When the year begins, when it opens, the one mantram I always make to sound in my own heart and mind is this: A new year is opening. Can I give myself a little more than last year? I pity from my soul the man or woman who has not learned the exquisite joy of giving of the self. There is not anything on earth that equals it in beauty, in grandeur, in sublimity, and in the peace and richness
it brings to both heart and mind.