Gift Rapt

Practicing generosity not only makes you feel good but connects you with the essence of who you really are.

By Sally Kempton

Zell Kravinsky is an investment broker who for years has been giving away his money—$45 million at last count. He made news in 2003 by donating a kidney to a woman he had not known. That was also the moment the Kravinsky family began saying that his altruism bordered on the obsessive. A New York Times reporter wrote that talking to him was "unsettling"—especially when Kravinsky said he'd gladly give his other kidney to a person whose life seemed more valuable than Kravinsky's own. His wife worried that he was depriving their children. Friends confessed that his gesture made them feel guilty. "I don't think I'm a bad person," Kravinsky's longtime friend Barry Katz told the reporter. "I give money to charity and I think I'm fairly generous, but when I look at what he's done, I can't help but notice a little voice in the back of my head saying, ‘What have you done lately? Why haven't you saved someone's life?’"

Whether you think Kravinsky's generosity is saintly or neurotic, it is hard to read about him without asking yourself the same sorts of questions: What am I really giving in this life? How much could I or should I give? Where am I truly generous, and where do I hold back? And when is generosity out of balance?

These questions show up with special intensity during holiday time, when the very air seems to vibrate with invitations to max out your credit cards on gifts, and when your desire to buy for friends all the stuff you're too sensible to buy for yourself wars with the uneasy feeling that the money you're spending could feed dozens of needy children for a year. The questions rise even more insistently after watching a movie like The Constant Gardener or, for me, when I drive past the pickers' camps that line the back roads around Salinas, California. That's when I wonder when I last sent a check to the farm workers' union, and why I'm not teaching meditation at the local high school.

Generosity is one of the 10 paramitas, or enlightened qualities, that Buddhists try to cultivate; it is a core virtue extolled in every spiritual and religious tradition. It may also be the one virtue that most of us believe we possess. The department store's Christmas tag line "Everyone has a gift to give!" is not only a brilliant marketing ploy but also a reflection of our need to believe that in a pinch, we'd choose to offer rather than grasp.

In one sense, generosity is natural: We can no more help giving than we can live without the support of everything we receive. Verses in the Vedas describe the generosity of the natural elements, the way the earth supports us without ever demanding thanks, the way the sun shines and the rain falls. The universe is, in fact, a web of giving and receiving; to grasp the truth of this, we need only to remember the eighth-grade science trip to the pond, or to think about the life of a city, with its symbiotic, mutually dependent networks of relationship.

But if our essence is naturally generous, the ego fears not having enough, worries about getting hurt or losing out, feels anxious at the thought of looking silly or getting ripped off, and above all, looks for a payoff. So for most of us, there's a continual push-pull between our natural generosity and genuine desire to share and the ego's feeling of lack and its desire to drive a bargain.

That's why practicing generosity can be such a boundary-expanding thing to do. Every time we make a genuine offering or even think a generous thought, especially when we can do it for its own sake without thought of reward, we strengthen our essence. In that way, generosity truly is an enlightening activity: It opens us to the loving, abundant, good-natured core of ourselves and, at least for the moment, loosens the ego's grip.

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