We are awash in generosity. And yet it can neither be taught nor learned, neither given nor taken. Being generous is never just being something. Nor is it just doing something, least of all just giving. Olives give olive oil, and yet they know nothing of generosity. It’s because generosity, when it is anything, is not one thing, but two. Generosity is only meaningful when it teeters between being the generous quality of a person, the heart and soul of someone, one soul, who gives, and the singular quality of a generous gift. Giver and gift, soul and thing, feeling and object.
We say that a generous person is unselfish, altruistic, gracious. And we say that a generous gift is one that exceeds expectation, surprises some custom or norm. We are generous when we give in excess of some measure of giving. We give a gift, but there is more. We give a gift and then some, a gift and something more than the gift. The gift in itself is never simply generous. There is a spirit that accompanies it. We surrender, we give more than the gift. We give beyond giving.
Generosity gives something that is no longer the ordinary gift. Or maybe it begins as an ordinary gift, but in the moment it is surrendered, the strange and simply beautiful experience of surrender, of giving it away, of letting it go, of release, or relinquish, transforms the thing, the thing married to the act, into something extraordinary.
What is this transformation, this magic that happens, this awakening of the heart? This supplement to the gift, this extra-gift? The gift given in generosity is not just a gift, but a thing that passes into something else, surpasses or transcends, It’s something that was in a way not to be given, something that cannot—should not—be planned, cannot be given as the execution of a plan, a premeditated act of giving. And, in retrospect, looking back up stream to the experience of receiving the gift, it is never received as a mere gift. Just as no gift is simply given, no gift is simply received. The object of generosity, what we far too quickly call a gift, is transcendental, excessive, the exteriorisation of something unexpectedly—necessarily unexpectedly—spiritual in us. It is our heart opening, extending, exiting.
The gift of generosity can never be expected, can never be received as a simple gift. An authentic gift, a true product of generosity, is already too much, more than enough, more than the thing to be given. If a gift slides untroubled into the economy of giving, it cannot be seen as generous. A gift passed along in that way, as a mere gift, gifted like a settling of invisible accounts, anticipated, received, warranted and declared, tied up and totalised, it will be as though it had never been given. The mere gift is self-effacing, self-absorbing, self-nourishing, and self-sufficient, it dissolves into nothing, giving nothing.
It’s only when there is a rupture, an unexpected, opening, an indulgence, an unforeseeable bountifulness, only when self-less-ness, that thing that can never, by definition, appear, indeed appears, does generosity appear. Generosity is the instant of selflessness, or rather, self-lessness, in the very strongest sense: when the self is erased, when the ego is washed away as if into the sands of a cosmic wave, when there is no subject, if only for fleeting breath, eyelids closed gently and the lungs filled so that seeing and being seen, knowing and being known, presence and absence, totality and nothingness, become inseparable to such a point that words like ‘together’ dissolve and no number other than ‘one’ can be part of our senses. The giver disappears, and the gift is not given by a generous ego, for this would not be generous, the ego that knows itself to be generous is never generous. It is only when the giver recedes, withdraws in the evening, effaces itself, becomes nothing. Generosity cannot be describe in terms of ‘it gives’, but rather as ’it is given’. And in the end, or maybe in the beginning, the ‘it’ refers undeniable, the original of gifts and the source of all generosity.