being generous. When I feel whole, when I don't feel needy, I forget myself. I share more. I become kinder. In the end, Generosity becomes the great Act of Kindness that sustains the world.
My grandfather lived with my family for some years, when he was in his middle nineties. The story he liked most to tell, when people asked him how he liked living with us, was one in which Smokey, our very friendly old Labrador Retriever, had once again gotten through the gate and made his way to the grade school three blocks away. The children there loved him, and the teachers used him as a therapy for children who had dog fears, but the Humane Society came by every morning and picked up all dogs off leashes, and Smokey had been “arrested” many times.
“The school called me,” my grandfather would say, “and told me, ‘Smokey is here. Come quickly before the Pound comes.’ So I rushed to school as fast as I could with the leash, and the bell for the end of school rang just as Smokey and I were leaving. So, Emily walked with us.”
Emily, my youngest child, was eight at the time. My grandfather was ninety-four.
He continued, “We had just started walking when suddenly it started to rain. Emily took off her raincoat”—at that point in the story my grandfather always started to cry—“and said, ‘Here, Grandpa. You wear this.’”
That was the story he told most.
Generosity stories, kindness stories, are the ones we all must tell most to keep our hearts and spirits alive in this most complicated and difficult and amazing life. The wonderful stories in this inspiring book both touched my heart and lifted my spirit. I am sure they will do the same for you.
1
Opening Our Hearts
and Hands
It's not the earthquakeThat controls the advent of a different lifeBut storms of generosity….
—BORIS PASTERNAK
Iwas sitting in a café one day, waiting for a friend, when I noticed a middle-aged woman walking toward a nearby table, juggling three cups of coffee and the paraphernalia that goes along with them. She handed two of the cups over to two gentlemen who were sitting there. “Thank you,” one of them said. “My pleasure,” she replied and flashed such a radiant smile that I knew down to my bones that her simple act had brought her pleasure, and even happiness.
If you are like me, you want to be happy. Like me, you've probably spent a lot of time trying to be happy. Are you? A large study in England and the United States recently found that the number of Americans who consider themselves happy has been steadily declining over the past thirty years. I think it's because we're looking for happiness in all the wrong places.
The United States is currently undergoing the biggest sustained economic expansion in history, and the Internet and the stock market are creating multimillionaires left and right. It's all about making money these days. Even my peers, ex-lefties and hippies, talk about nothing but IPOs. Several young friends are regularly ridiculed by their peers for following their career passions instead of jumping into the dot-com craze. The clincher about where our contemporary values are came while I was watching the television show Greed: The Series. It's a game show in which contestants “climb the tower of greed,” and give in to their “need for greed” when “The Terminator” allows one of them to get an automatic $10,000 if they challenge a teammate. I couldn't get over the fact that greed—a vice, a poison, something that spiritual traditions historically caution against—was now elevated so openly into something good, something to be joyously indulged in.
What is wrong with this picture?
I don't profess to have all the answers. All I know is that in my twenties and thirties, I was your average unhappy and fearful person. Then, about twelve years ago, through a series of circumstances, I began to refocus my life on what truly mattered and stopped being miserable. And that has made all the difference.
It started when I, along with several others, published the book Random Acts of Kindness.™ It seemed like a good idea at the time—let's all do nice little things for strangers—but once I began to see and hear about its effects, I sensed I had stumbled upon something very important. Suddenly I was inundated with letters from people telling me about the joy they had experienced as either doers or receivers of these acts. I will never forget the letter from a high school student who said he was going to kill himself until he read our book and decided that life was worth living. I became fascinated with the power of kindness, and went on to help write a series of books on the topic. I tried to enact what I was writing about and became more kind both to strangers and to those I am close to. Like the boy who didn't kill himself, I got happier.
I began to wonder about the other qualities that could produce the same positive effect as kindness, and turned my attention to gratitude. The more I cultivated a sense of appreciation for all that I had instead of focusing on what I lacked, the happier and less fearful I was. I wrote about my experiences, this time in Attitudes of Gratitude, and once again, I received many letters about the power gratitude has in bringing peace of mind and a sense of contentment.
My study of gratitude led me to generosity, the spontaneous giving of ourselves and our resources to someone else. In a sense, I have now come full circle. Generosity is the mother of kindness. Our desire to give help, comfort, support, or appreciation is often the reason we do kind things.
In reading, talking, and thinking about generosity, I realized just how important it is. Boris Pasternak alludes to the power of generosity in the quote at the beginning of this chapter. We tend to think about generosity as volunteering or giving money or time, but generosity is actually much broader. It comes in all kinds of forms—material, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. We can be generous when we give our knowledge, our awareness, our empathy, or our silence. Generosity is also about letting go of grudges, hurts, and concepts of ourselves and the world that stand in the way of our connection to others.
True generosity is open-heartedness, the experience and expression of our boundless, unconditionally loving nature. It is such an important concept that Buddhists consider its opposite to be delusion. When we are out of touch with our giving hearts, the natural flow of generosity within us, we think we need to hold on to money, possessions, and fixed ideas. We are sure we need these things to be happy, when our very grasping and clinging is what makes us miserable. We hold on so tightly that our hands are unavailable to reach out for the happiness we could gain by letting go. Our delusion of material happiness prevents us from being truly happy.
However, when we are living from true generosity, we feel expansive and abundant. We know that we can find true happiness in loving and being loved to the core of our being. Our hearts and hands are open, ready to offer what they can and able to receive what comes back to us in return.
As the woman in the café realized, giving makes us feel great. It's a fabulous feeling, even when we offer something as small as a cup of coffee. Giving lifts us out of our preoccupation with ourselves and reminds us that there is plenty of kindness to go around.
Like kindness and gratitude, giving—both of ourselves and our unique gifts—is actually very simple. So simple that it's often difficult to believe it can bring us such joy. We think giving should be hard, so we make it complicated. We guilt-trip ourselves into thinking we should give more or try harder, usually turning our guilt into shame, and then trying to avoid the whole issue entirely.
It doesn't have to be that way. The purpose of A Giving Heart is to provide encouragement. Encouragement in noticing that the river of generosity
