Tag: Generosity

Create your own reality

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

A few weeks ago my wife and I took a cab at night in New York city.  As we were leaving we noticed a black bag on the floor in the back seat.  It contained a Lonely Planet Guide to the USA, two pairs of ticket stubs (a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden and the Museum of Natural History), a digital camera, a business card of a trainer at New York Sports Club, and a copy of an Australian passport with some phone numbers in Kenya handwritten on the back.

We had a mystery on our hands.

We made a few phone calls to places that were underlined in the Lonely Planet guide.  The Harlem Flophouse was absolutely no help – the person who answered the phone didn’t speak English very well and had never heard of the guest.  We left a message at NY SportsClub.  Then we looked at the photos on the digital camera, hoping that somehow this person had photographed the outside of their hotel in NYC (sure!).  No luck on that count, but clearly our forgetful traveler had been all over the world on a long trip, including a stint in what looked like sub-Saharan Africa. What a shame to lose the record of that experience.

Next step: the Internet.  Facebook, Australian Whitepages, etc.  Luckily the traveler’s name was uncommon.  We sent a few emails, even tried calling an opthamologist’s office in Australia on Skype – but it was closed for a holiday and you couldn’t even leave a message.

A week passed, and then another.  Nothing. The trail had run cold.

Then, an email last night.  Our world-traveling Australian was back home.  He was thrilled, and so were we.  Better yet, his good friends are leaving tonight back to Australia.  We met this morning, and I gave them the bag.  They were thankful, and I was glowing.  Who could believe this story would have such a happy ending?

Why did this make me so happy?

For just a few minutes this morning, I got to live in a world that was just how I’d want it to be.  In that world, when you lose something, you get it back.  Complete strangers treat each other kindly and with respect.  Generosity is the norm.

And then I got to thinking about philanthropy and the warm feeling I had.  And it helped remind me that philanthropy is an act of giving, and not an asset allocation.

This may seem obvious, but all the talk about creating more efficient philanthropic marketplaces and increasing donor demands for objective data seems to miss this point:  that part of the reason people give is so that the world, for them, can be how they want it to be – at least for a little while.

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Why I’m making a donation to Dave Farmar

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

I’ve never met Dave Farmar, and he’s never met me.  He’s a yoga teacher in Denver who has a free podcast which, if you’ve got a strong yoga practice, I recommend highly.

Dave puts these podcasts out into the world, and I’m practical enough to understand that he does this both to be generous and as a way of raising his own visibility.  At the same time, Dave isn’t asking for anything in return for the 20-30 of his yoga classes of his that I’ve done in the last year, and that’s exactly why I feel like I should give a donation to him or to a charity he supports (and blogging about it is a great way to ensure that I follow through).

I spend a lot of time on this blog encouraging more generosity, and it occurs to me that part of this process has to be me cultivating my own generosity in tangible ways – big and small.

The trick here is the dreaded Free Rider problem.  It’s downright irrational to pay for things where you can get the benefit without paying the cost (the classic example is national defense or a clean environment; but you can free ride by not voting in a national election too).

How do we act when no one is looking AND where it makes sense – economically, rationally – to do nothing?

The same question came up today when I went with my family to the Museum of Natural History.  The teller told us that the price was $47, and he kept on saying, “But that’s just a suggested admission.  How much do you want to pay?”  In a situation like that, with the teller essentially saying, “Hey, most everyone pays a lot less than this,” it’s hard not to feel silly saying, “No, I’d rather pay the $47.”  And, in all candor, if it hadn’t been for my wife’s encouragement, I’m not sure I would have paid the full “suggested admission” of $47.  It felt like a lot of money, and the teller – who was trying to be nice – was encouraging me to take a pass and spend the money on something else.

(footnote: the museum was fabulous.  Definitely worth the $47.)

My point is not that I’m some paragon of generosity — it’s something I struggle with as much as anyone.  My point is that we’re all have to practice being more generous, especially in situations where it doesn’t make rational sense to do so.  Donate or not, I’ll continue to have access to Dave Farmer’s great yoga classes for free; the Museum of Natural History will get most of its funding from corporations and other major donors and doesn’t need my $47; and Barak Obama would have become President even if I hadn’t voted for him.

But if we don’t put our money where our mouth is — if we don’t step up and support things that are good and beautiful and hopeful in the world — we have no right to complain when we treated ungenerously in return.

And, increasingly, I believe that giving, generosity, kindness, forgiveness and hope are, first and foremost, acts of self-expression.  And, as we’ll see on January 20th, millions of small acts of self-expression can make historical change in the world.

Enjoy the innaguration.

Welcome to 2009, my namesake

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

From the BBC, and hat tip to Chris Blattman’s blog:

A Ugandan woman has given birth to a baby girl on board an international flight from Amsterdam to Boston after going into labour mid-flight.

The six-pound (2.7kg) baby named Sasha was delivered on New Year’s Eve with the help of two doctors on the eight-hour-long Northwest Airlines flight.

Sasha was deemed a Canadian citizen for customs’ purposes because she was born over Canada’s airspace.

Mother and baby were taken to a Boston hospital on landing and are doing well.

For whatever reason, this makes me feel connected and reminds me how small, international, and interconnected our world is.

I’m not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions, but I do like the idea of turning over a new leaf.

The problem with most resolutions is that they’re based on an accomplishment (“I will lose 10 pounds”).  Real change comes by changing your orientation and attitude.  The outcome is a result.

Some suggested resolutions that you might be able to keep:

“Be more interested.”

“Be more open.”

“Be more generous.”

“Smile more.”

“Breathe.”

What I like about these resolutions is that every day, every moment really,  you  have the chance to accomplish this goal.

Happy New Year, to little Sasha and to all of you.

Smile in the face of Madoff

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

It’s really struck me in a new way this week how serious this financial crisis is. Maybe it’s just the other shoe dropping on this new reality; or maybe it’s because, on top of everything , the former chairman of the NASDAQ, Bernard Madoff,  is accused of $50B out-and-out fraud in a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions. Despicable.

Where do we go from here? How about to some words of wisdom to start the weekend from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics:

The Virtues we get by first performing single acts of working…men come to be builders, for instance, by building; harp-players, by playing on the harp: exactly so, by doing just actions we come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave actions brave.

Translation: we become virtuous by acting with virtue; kind by acting with kindness; generous through acts of generosity.  Not the other way around.

Or, to take another turn at the same thought, from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own hear and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

Right now the world needs a whole lot of improving, and things will likely get worse before they get better.  So the question is: what can you put out into the world to get us there a little more quickly?

How about some extra kindness, virtue, and generosity?

Really, now is a great time to surprise people you love and people you don’t even know with small acts of kindness.  People all over are hurting, and they’ll really appreciate it.

And you will heal yourself in the process.

Is Generosity a Luxury Good?

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

A “luxury” good is something you consume more of as you have more money (economists call them “superior” goods, a subset of “normal” goods).  For example, as people get wealthier, they spend proportionally more on Tiffany rings, Hermes scarves and nights at the Ritz Carlton, and less on Kay Jewelers, Wal-Mart, and Best Western.

I’ve been fascinated by the role that optimism and pessimism play in today’s financial markets, specifically because I’d prefer to think that, for the most part, the price of stocks and bonds and condos in Florida is determined by something objective (like cash flows of the underlying business).  Of course it’s really about supply and demand, and demand for assets is at historically low levels.

This means that financial markets are like the old joke: two guys hear a bear outside their tent in the woods.  The first guy starts lacing up his Nikes, and the second guy says, “What are you doing?  There’s no way you can outrun a bear.”  The first guy says, “I don’t have to run faster than the bear; I just have to run faster than you.”

That’s how financial markets work: when sentiments change, the rational thing to do (if you can) is to get out first.  This is how we got: Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy → defaults in a money market fund ( “breaking the buck”) → the end of liquidity → global economic meltdown.

So what about generosity, and specifically about philanthropy?  Is it the first thing to fall off the list when people’s portfolios are hit?  Where does it fall in the hierarchy of luxury vs. “inferior” goods (things you buy MORE of when you have less money?).

Wouldn’t it be amazing if, in tough times, people were MORE  philanthropic (on a relative if not on an absolute basis?).  Wouldn’t that say something extremely powerful about our society?

My worry is that this is not the case.

What scares me is the idea that philanthropy might be a luxury good.  Without a doubt, giving will decrease in the next 12 months.  Foundation assets (whether the Harvard Endowment, the Gates Foundation, or family foundations) are down, and out of that smaller pool of assets, people will give less.  But if generosity is a luxury good, that means it could be near the top of the list of things that people cut.  So the $260 billion worth philanthropic giving in the U.S. (2005 data) is itself at risk.

From what I’ve seen so far, donors and foundations are taking their philanthropic commitments very seriously and doing what they can to step up and support the nonprofits they believe in.

And that’s a good thing. It’s tantamount to running TOWARDS the bear and scaring him away.

On Aparigraha (or, Why do I still have instructions for my old Technics 5-CD changer?)

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

It’s absurd, really.  One (exciting) night over the Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and I spent a few hours battling with the junk that’s piled up in our oh-so-small basement.  We produced 6 full bags of trash and managed to remove an entire 7-foot tall bookshelf.  Mission accomplished (at least for the next 6 months).

This isn’t because I’m a relentless buyer of junk.  It’s really about the random, totally useless stuff I’ve managed to hang on to: the instruction manuals to appliances (they’re all available online, right?); the extra trays for my oven I haven’t needed in the 5 years since it was installed; the random collection of mounting screws for who-knows-which speaker (or maybe it’s for a telephone); the Ziploc bag with 100+ pens and pencils dating back, literally, to high school.

And this after I started a conscious “throw stuff away if you haven’t used it for a year” program about 4 years ago (though in fairness that’s been mostly about clothes so far).

What’s fascinating is to pay attention to the feeling I have when I throw the pack of unknown-use screws in the trash (“But what if I NEED this someday?!”)  There’s an emotional attachment to this junk, and the sense that I will kick myself if the day arrives when I need to, say, program my VCR after throwing out the instructions or that I’ll have a sudden, pressing need to use the delayed cook settings on my stove.

“What if I need this someday?” is actually quite hard to get over.

“Yamas,” or moral restraints, are a limb of the eight-limbed path of yoga.  (Whatever you think of yoga in particular, I’d argue that all spiritual traditions contain universal truths.  So if you prefer references to the Book of Luke to “Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece” that’s fine with me too).

The last of the Yamas is Aparigraha, or non-hoarding.  A great layman’s description of Aparigraha can be found in the wonderful book Meditations from the Mat by Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison:

At first glance, aparigraha sounds like a problem of the shop-till-you-drop club.  But upon further examination, I realize that my whole apartment is one big aparigraha violation.  I am not a big spender, and I hardly ever shop.  So how can this be?  I don’t want more; I just don’t want to lose what I already have.  I might miss that shirt I haven’t worn in years.  I might want to read that book again someday.  That chipped bowl is still perfectly usable.  It’s not that I am a hoarder; I am a nonrelinquisher.  I don’t want to grieve the loss of anything.  Aparigraha is an opportunity to learn how to say good-bye.

If you are in the business of raising money or selling in any form, you are asking people to let go of something (an idea, a relationship, money they might need someday for something else), so understanding how you hoard and how natural it is to hang on to things is important.  And if you have any money in the stock market or you own a home, you’ve just had the terribly unpleasant experience of discovering that you have to get by on 30-50% less than you had a couple of months ago.  So you’re in the midst of this whether you like it or not.

This isn’t just about the junk in the basement, it’s about keeping versus sharing.  There are lots of things we hoard because we think that by hanging on to them we’ll have more for ourselves.

Credit, praise, apologies and love are high on my list of things one should give away liberally.  Or if that’s asking too much, start with sharing a smile, an insight, or an idea.

And if giving an old stereo or a faded T-shirt away gets you there more quickly, you might want to start there.

(Full disclosure: the stack of old unused stereo equipment I have to sell is going to the Salvation Army this weekend if I get no takers on Craigslist).

What do you do when you have nothing to gain by helping?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

You can hold on tight to things.  Be stingy.  Look out for yourself and your own best interest, and think about how little time you have to help.

Or you can be generous.  You can help someone else because it is the right thing to do, because it is who you are and it is the way you carry yourself in the world.

Today I met a guy who helped me a lot for no good reason.  I’ve spent exactly 30 minutes over a coffee with him, after exchanging a few emails, and I’m pretty sure this is just the person he is.  No strings attached.  Nothing to gain.   A generous, honest, straightforward, humble, amazing person.

You can be sure I’ll do everything I can to return his favors in spades – especially because he’s asking for nothing in return.