Generosity

My parents raised their children to believe in giving for its own sake, not for thanks or reward. However, now that I have experienced pure generosity from either side of the equation, I realize that generosity always rewards the giver with connection. Generosity is what makes a group of strangers a community.

When I was younger, my parents gave me cash for birthdays. If the money went through my father, he always took a cut. Not for himself, but for charity. Every time, it was the same – 10% was deducted to donate to a school for poor children in India. I found this charade incredibly aggravating, but I did develop the habit of giving.

My mother taught me about generosity through more haphazard acts I witnessed in our daily lives. When I was three we lived in India, and periodically my mom, known among my cousins as a terrifying tigress of discipline from the children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard school of childrearing, would throw our clothes out the open windows of our moving Ambassador car. They were the clothes my brother, sister, and I had outgrown, and she would toss them to the street children we passed along the crowded roads of New Delhi.

True to my upbringing, when I was nine I gathered up the majority of stuffed animals and dolls I had collected in my short tenure on Earth. We had a meeting where I explained to them that I loved them but that they were going to live with other kids who needed them more. We all cried a little, and then I asked my dad to donate my toys to charity. (In a post script, the delivery was intercepted by nurses at the hospital where my dad worked, who apparently moonlighted as toy delivery bandits. I guess my parents taught me about outsourcing too.)

This past year, I got to experience random acts of generosity from the receiving end. I decided to celebrate graduating from my master’s program by hiking the Appalachian Trail. I started in Georgia and wound my way up through the woods to Maine. Along the way, complete strangers offered me food, clean clothes, a bed, a ride to town, or a shower. In discussions with my trail angels, as we hikers called them, I found out why these total strangers gave so willingly of their own limited resources, over and over, to smelly, ravenous strangers they encountered along the trail and whom they most likely would never see again. Trail angels helped me because they were proud of the journey I had undertaken. More importantly, by helping me, trail angels became a part of my journey.

As a consequence of my time on the Appalachian Trail, I believe that generosity is what makes us human. When I give, I know that I am not just me, by myself; I am a part of a larger community that I support and rely upon in turn. When I give, I know that I can give because others have given to me.

I’d like to live my life as though everyone were hiking some kind of trail. When opportunity presents itself, I’d like to be generous to the people I meet – because I am proud of them for what they are trying to do – to live dignified, joyous lives – and because in that way, their journeys will become my journeys too.