Generosity

Generosity gives a useful surplus somewhere to go

At the outdoor concert, you have picked up two printed programs. The person beside you is trying to read the running order over your shoulder with the concentration of a scholar examining a distant inscription. You offer the spare. They accept, and the next piece acquires a name. Your accidental collection of programs has become somebody else’s evening guide.

Finding the balance in Generosity

Offer a spare concert program to another listener who is trying to follow the running order.

A gift serves its recipient when usefulness, freedom and a fitting cost meet in the same offer.

What Generosity makes possible

Something small in your possession can make a public experience more accessible or enjoyable to another person. Generosity lets that possibility matter even when no friendship, praise or repayment follows. You may also discover how little is needed: the useful contribution is sometimes a clear page or a minute of attention.

Generosity in ordinary life

A community event

Offer a few minutes for an ordinary task you can comfortably do when the organizer asks for help.

A public reading

If you have a spare printed handout, make it available to someone who wants one.

Nearby virtues, different work

Fairness

Fairness concerns a person’s due share; Generosity may offer something beyond that claim.

Compassion

Compassion responds to suffering; Generosity can enhance an already pleasant occasion.

Generosity and its counterfeits

The gift with an audience

Giving mainly to secure gratitude counterfeits Generosity. The recipient should not have to perform appreciation to justify the offer.

The unwanted surplus

Pressing an unneeded object on someone counterfeits Generosity by treating disposal as a gift. Let usefulness and consent guide the offer.

How to cultivate Generosity

1. Notice a resource you can comfortably spare.

2. Offer it in a form the person can use.

3. Let the exchange end without creating a debt.

Try it today

If an ordinary opportunity arises, offer something useful you can comfortably spare. Make declining easy and expect no further exchange.

Questions worth returning to

• Is this useful to the person receiving it?
• What am I quietly expecting in return?

Keep the practice proportionate

Give within your capacity. A useful offer can be declined.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. But that fact did not lessen the glow of pleasure which so good-natured an action had given me.

   A. G. Gardiner · Many Furrows · On Saying “Please”

   Gardiner has found a coin after a conductor offered to carry him without immediate payment. The offer still matters because its goodwill was freely given before it turned out not to be needed.

2. When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion.

   Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Part I, Section I, Chapter II

   Smith describes enjoyment renewed through someone else’s first encounter with a work. Giving access to an experience can enlarge the giver’s pleasure as well as the receiver’s.

3. Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is that we might convey to some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought.

   Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays · Gifts

   In “Gifts,” Emerson moves from necessities to the fittingness of a present. The giver’s attention to the receiver matters more than the size or display of the offering.

4. The most maligned landlady who lives in the house with her tenants is usually ready to lend a scuttle full of coal to one of them who may be out of work, or to share her supper.

   Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Charitable Effort

   Addams records practical generosity among neighbors with limited means. The example concerns a particular useful resource, freely shared by someone who knows the immediate circumstances.

5. If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving for social intercourse that all men feel.

   Jane Addams · Twenty Years at Hull-House · First Days at Hull-House

   Addams explains why Hull-House offers social life as well as material assistance. Generosity can give access to pleasure and company, including a spare concert program and a welcoming place to sit.

6. a newsboy slipped one of his papers beneath Raggles’s elbow, where it lay on the muddy pavement.

   O. Henry · The Trimmed Lamp, and Other Stories of the Four Million · The Making of a New Yorker

   In “The Making of a New Yorker,” a newsboy puts a paper beneath an injured stranger’s elbow. Among the crowd’s grander gestures, this small useful gift comes from what he already has. Generosity takes its scale from the opportunity.

7. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers · An Apology for Idlers

   Stevenson defends contributions that do not look like paid work. Company, encouragement and freely offered time can make a real difference to another person’s experience.

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