As If
There is Nothing to Lose - How giving come from
gratitude
Sallie Jiko Tisdale
Tricycle
Once I was young and
poor—and generous. I shared an old
house with several people and slept on the porch and owned nothing
more valuable than my bicycle. I volunteered many hours every week
at community organizations. One day, when I had only five dollars,
I treated a friend to dinner, and afterward we laughed about my now
total poverty. It was easy to give away what I had; I never doubted
that the world would somehow provide for me in turn.
Now I have a house and a car and a savings
account, and I am not so generous. I do give—my money, my time, my
attention—but sometimes I give reluctantly, with a little worry.
Sometimes I want a nicer house, a newer car. I wonder if I have
enough money saved. I want more time to myself. It is not just a
matter of youth and age. I have many more things now, and that
means I have more things to lose.
When I had little, everything I had was
important. If I found a sweater I liked at the Goodwill, it felt
like my birthday. In a way, having nothing meant everything in the
world was mine. Even a sandwich was cause for celebration, and
nothing distracted me from enjoying it. Every gift was a delight,
and I was grateful for everything I had.
Gratitude, the simple and profound feeling
of being thankful, is the foundation of all generosity. I am
generous when I believe that right now, right here, in this form
and this place, I am myself being given what I need. Generosity
requires that we relinquish something, and this is impossible if we
are not glad for what we have. Otherwise the giving hand closes
into a fist and won’t let go.
This generosity, arising from abundance, is
natural. We see it in the world around us all the time. Haya
Akegarasu loved spring. “Young grasses,” he wrote, “I can’t help
it—I want to kiss you.” To him the spring grasses were great
teachers, because they made a “whole effort” to simply live their
lives. “Their growth is a long, wide tongue that covers the whole
world,” he said. I see a fearless generosity in the flowers and
trees, in the way birds sing out at dawn, in the steady drumming of
the rain. As I grew older and found I had things to protect, I
forgot. I completely forgot that I had always had enough in the
first place. Now I am trying to learn this once again—total
abundance, nothing begrudged.