The more we give the more we receive. I really believe this with my whole being. Also, miraculously, the more we give the more we still have that we can give away! It is like a perpetual motion machine, sorry thermodynamics. The receiving is not a quid pro quo transactional process with a rigid time schedule. The receiving may not even be so much an outwardly event, it might be more of an internal transformation. It could be that it trains us or orients us so that we are able to discover all the good that was right there in front of us all along. Literally the only thing standing between here and Nirvana is the desire and confidence to start sharing with abandon. Not everyone is in a position to do this right now, there is disease and poverty and unemployment and misery and war. But if enough of us committed to starting the process we would transform the world through an infinitely complicated set of interconnected cascading events slowly bring an end to all this despair.
I personally find that I am most easily able to give when I am either in a really positive mood or curiously in a really depressed mood. It makes sense that when we are feeling great everything around us is sunshine and unicorns, even in Seattle in the winter. But, at least for me, when I am really depressed, I also want to give. I feel like I have nothing to lose or maybe I am stripped of all my unconscious facades and pleasantries, or maybe I am just yearning to feel better. But, as of late, I have been able to consciously remind myself, like being in an eyes-wide-open lucid dream, that I would like to try to give complements, or words, or smiles. However I get there, once there, (even in Seattle in the winter!) the positive genuine caring and loving namaste that I simply cast out into the universe directed at whichever sentient being I encounter that morning comes back to me. Sometimes it comes back five-fold, other times not at all, but when it does come back it begins an uncontrollable game of tag. I want to, or really, need to share it again and again.
And imagine if enough of us chose to cultivate this, chose to put this on our daily “to-do” list. Could the Navajo nation remain without clean drinking water for much longer1? Would more than a dozen former service members continue to take their own lives each day2? Wouldn’t we feel compelled to pull the roughly one in six American children out of poverty3. I am not sure of the exact mechanism connecting here to there, but surely it would get better. Could we reverse the polar ice caps from their seemingly inevitable melt just by being mindful and hopeful and committed to simply sharing our love?
If you are feeling empty that is the time to give. If you are feeling full that is also a great time to give. In the prescient words of the Dalai Lama, “Be kind when it is possible. It is always possible.”
