Generosity is often associated with material value, wealth or riches. It refers to giving away a material thing of value that is external to us, a thing that we ourselves had been given or had acquired, an article of clothing, a parcel of food, a precious stone. At the origin of this kind of generosity is the act of an other, of someone else who showed us some sort of generosity. It’s an exchange whereby we were given the thing, or perhaps purchased the thing in exchange for something of value.
In this sense an act of generosity is a kind of story, a narrative, a chronology or a history, a chain of events. It’s the story of a thing that becomes possessed, then dispossessed. It’s a relation to things that come and go in a kind of cycle, things that we might, in another world, another life, have lived without, and with which we live now briefly or for a long period.
It’s the economy of possessions lived along the way, the tracing of a course of passage of time and events. Generosity of the external things like material objects is part of a relation to a thing that we entered this material world without, and which we will depart this material world without.
‘You can’t take it with you,’ they say, as a way of making more noble the choice to give away money or things of value. They are, at the end of the day indifferent, impersonal, inert, and thus valueless. This can essentially be said of any external object we might come across over the course of a long day. If we are tempted to speak of the value of thing, it is that we speak not of implicit value, but of passing, relative value, the value of something to someone. If it were authentic, genuine, eternal, we would not need to resort to words, there would be no words we would not want words. We would want only silence. Its value would be self-present and self-evident. The words, the representations, the derivatives, the transfers, the exchanges, are would be the saddening declarations of the absence of giving, or the dissolving of its ties to the timeless authentic origins of value that it parrots, as pleasure of having things that shout aloud to us that we will not always have them, or perhaps, that we never will have had them. The thing has this fleeting value to the extent that we can enjoy it or make use of it through this living life. Any kind of generosity we might be able to express by passing this object of value on to another, to a friend or to loved one, would be a false one, not only for me but for this person too, the value would temporary, dissolving, thus ultimately valueless. It is only a matter of time.
The time of generosity, generosity’s time, is crucial to surrender because it leads us to ask what authentic surrender really is, what true giving is, and thereby what truly giving of ourselves, surrendering ourselves could actually be. There is of course no generosity in giving away something that has no value. In temporal terms, material goods loose their shine, decay, disappear or are destroyed. From a subjective point of view, those who value material goods live transient lives. What is of value for a child will not hold the same value for someone at the sunset of life. The appreciation of value is ephemeral, and the meaning of generosity varies accordingly in time.