On Generosity . . .
Generosity is profoundly human, and we know, we feel, we believe, that acts of generosity demonstrate our power to be one with another, to look beyond our self, our needs, our desires, and to push out that rambunctious jumble of our inner thoughts to connect with the fate of those around us. Generosity is essential for our capacity to do with a little less so that others may have a fair shake. Generosity challenges us to live with less so that those fleeing encroaching deserts and the devastations of war might survive the journey and spare their children the haunting spectre of malnutrition. Generosity frees us from ourselves so that we can be others. Generosity links us all together.
Generosity is fleeting when people are bound by their next possessions. The hoarding that must take place, the skimping, or, more aptly, the indebtedness assumed to buy new things bleeds one of any sensitivity for someone else. Even this distillation of generosity into the passing of material possession ignores a generosity of the heart which is so much more than a tithe one may toss into the swinging caroller’s bucket in front of target on Christmas eve day. Generosity is not something of high holidays or birthday surprises; it is not something of occasion but of a way of feeling in the morning when the cracks into new days appear and we fill them with a day’s routine, a day’s goals, a day’s prescriptions.
Generosity is a spirt that engulfs us so that when we see ourselves in others, their needs transpose ours, making whatever shiny new things we saw on TikTok diminish or disappear so that we can fulfil someone else. This transfer of materials for needs is not the point; it is the spirt of generosity awakened in us that matters—that we see other’s fates as intertwined with ours. Ignorance and passivity are replaced with pangs and stares, as we recognise that that other is struggling in ways that we are not.
Even this does not come close enough to the art of generosity as it falls somewhere between a politician’s “I feel your pain” and tears shed for crying babies on our screens. It presumes that generosity is within our own conceptual architecture and divorced from acts towards others. We find ourselves crying for those that need so much as we snatch buttered popcorn from our cup. We also feel relinquished upon the burst of tear as it hits our cushioned couch. We are relieved that we felt so much.
Generosity is not failed when we feel but do not act. It is merely half baked and so, as nourishment, it is not enough. Feeling so much can mutate into feelings that we do so little, into guilt and helplessness, that then dims the prospect of generosity taking hold again. Instead, feeling is sign, an internal chorus, that shows us the promise of generosity, even if it is up and beyond the next hill. This signal glows and pulsates. It affects our breath and rhythms. It pulls us up and out.
As with everything in life, we cannot be subsumed by our basest instincts, the desires to fall into the couch and scroll through the minuscule titbits of others we cannot touch. Generosity arises from connection—through friends, family, and communities. It demands both feeling and action, a dance between the two that propels us toward meaningful change. We must interact with one another to allow the spirt of generosity to emerge. We must feel and act; let the swirl between the two propel us forward.
Dorian LaGuardia
