The Joy of Giving — Heart Gift
I wanted to share with you some of my father, Arthur Tarnowski’s, reflections on the importance and joy of giving. This is the very reason I started the Heart Gift* Community. If these words touch you, I would love to invite you to contribute a Heart Gift of your own to the community:
‘There’s much that overlaps in loving and giving. The only thing I truly possess, I claim, is that which I’ve given away. By which I don’t mean that my possessions consist of the sum-total of presents I ever gave. No, what I refer to is the content of the self, what I pour of my inner self into each gift I make. The higher the gift’s content in the self which my heart thrusts into it, spiritually the richer I become. Pari Passu. If I pluck a roadside daisy, and, my heart transported with the yearning, the joy of taking it to somebody I love, the gift of that daisy becomes a royal gift. If however, a billionaire, I give him/her a cheque for a million, but with an eye on renown, social standing or some such calculation, I would have given — nothing. In fact, added to my inner sterility, deepened my soul’s emptiness. Which is not to say that the recipient wouldn’t have received something — that million — but merely that I wouldn’t have truly given, unless that is, I put my heart, my self, innocent of calculation, into the gift of that million.
Loving and giving both flow outwards. Out of oneself and to the loved one, the person given to. And in this outgoing act the giver not merely finds fulfillment, but self-Creation. A hell infinitely more horrifying than the conventional one of fire and brimstone would consist of being banished to eternal suspension in the void of outer space. In absolute nothingness, perceptual aloneness, unrelieved by any activity whatsoever, be it alternation of day and night, hot and cold — not even the boon of Satan’s torments for company. Which is to say that far from being self-contained, we are utterly and vitally dependent on our environment, on others, to relate with and to sustain ourselves…
While superficially a calculated attitude may often prove a useful tool in pursuit of the expediencies of living, deeper down it acts as bane to Life. To be true the individual act of giving should be pure giving, pure of calculation/scheming, of the quid pro quo of the marketplace. In global totality, the acts of giving perforce must equal the acts of receiving. The one rests implicitly in the other. But this modern world of homo economicus, of the acquisitive society which glorifies in and exhorts us into a never-sated ruthless pursuits of material goods and ostentation; this world of push push push, grab grab grab, rush rush rush rush; this world so abundant in the act of savage taking, so beggared in the act of selfless giving; this world forgets the mathematical truth that since the two must be equal, it ends up in impoverishment. In material plenitude at the cost of inner desolation. The temper of this consumer society urges us to elevate acquisitiveness into the end-good of like, the Sesame to cornucopia/bliss. And thus upon meeting someone new, at the threshold to a potential relationship, we pull out mental abaci and calculate:- “What’s in this for me? Money? Enhanced social standing? Kudos? Sex, mote pleasure?” No room here for the thought of giving, no room for the other, for the you — no room at the inn. And so even when our calculating proves outwardly profitable, when we scheme and play our cards successfully and secure such avidly coveted things worldly and material. Do we thereby attain a sense of inner peace and contentment, of fulfilment at the end of the day? Hardly. Rush rush rush, grab grab grab. And we flit through life in a headlong spin, as if in a flying slip over a dog’s turd on ice. Unto that gaping whirlpool of chill vacuity in whose sullen depths hell stands reflected.’
* Heart Gift is a community of people who give from their hearts. You are invited to join to be inspired and, when ready, to share your favorite quote, letter, joke, prayer, advice, music, art piece, story, song, ritual, Grandma’s recipe — anything. We can all help create a more beautiful world when we are Permissionaries — giving each other permission to be authentic, vulnerable and heart led.
