I go to the library some days, travelling across town an hour using various routes to reach the same place, so that I can see new things. Then I push open the gates made up of about a hundred steel plates, each embossed with an ‘A’ in a different font, and go in early with the most anxious students and the people carrying their life’s possessions in enormous woven plastic bags with them.
I try to ignore the shelves so that I can focus on my work and when I need a break, I take my sandwich into the courtyard and languish in the delicious awe that libraries exist.
I won’t ever get over public libraries. They assume that everyone has the right to access the best quality information.
Every library is an expression of our highest ideals for ourselves, and of the finest democratic principles.
Each library is an unassuming declaration of its own generosity.
Generosity
‘Generosity’ is the virtue of liberal giving. It’s true test is the lack of expectation of reciprocity, although at least one modern philosopher believed that gifts are impossible because as soon as something is recognised as a gift, the receiver becomes indebted. I don’t know that I disagree with him. Receiving can be a fraught undertaking, bedevilled by embarrassment, or indignation, or a sense that you could never repay the giver.
The second spiritual law of yoga is the law of giving and receiving. I like that it incorporates the two things into one and that generosity is not stand-alone quality. To receive with grace is a virtue too.
The kind of generosity I’ve been thinking about most recently – apart from libraries – is the one that begins with ‘There’s someone I think you should meet…’
Some people are so good at connecting people in a thoughtful and pointed way. They intuitively match interests, personalities and histories, and then make the effort required to link the parties without awkwardness.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past week thinking about the importance of these people, and about their enormous generosity. It takes a particular kind of attentiveness to be good at bringing people together, and a big-spiritedness to follow through on hunches about how two or more people might enhance one another’s lives if they could only be brought through the no-man’s land of being strangers to one another.
I read something Twyla Tharpe, author of The Creative Habit, wrote saying that where your life is in five years’ time depends on the books you’re reading and the people you’re meeting now.
I’m reading far fewer books than at any other point in my life, but for the first time in years, I’m meeting people in the second and third circles of my acquaintance. I still struggle with the different energy required for interacting with real people as opposed to story people, but I am grateful for having been pulled out of my hidey-hole.
For years – and for good reasons – I hunkered down to grow a carapace of self-sufficiency, keeping human interaction mostly at the arm’s length that social media allows.
Now when someone says ‘There is someone I think you should meet,’ I tend to think they’re probably right.
The opposite of generosity
Opening up to more human interaction comes at a cost: the possibility of being exposed to the worst in people.
I’ve had two incidents recently where someone has practically torch-gunned my face off with some internal sourness that had been urgently waiting to be freed. In both cases, it was so unexpected and so vitriolic that it shook me for days.
One always understands, intellectually, that a certain kind of nastiness and criticism arises out of fear or resentment or any number of negative feelings, but they can still really wobble you.
Meanness, I believe, is the opposite of generosity.
One way of practising generosity is to assume positive intent. Some people seem set on expecting the worst from everyone. It must be tiring to live like that.
It’s excoriating to be on the receiving end of it.
Jules sent me this wonderful song called Hater’s Anthem. It cheered me a lot. I’ll play it next time someone unleashes their ugly at me.
Lots of love,
K.
I am smiling, despite the freezing rain of oh-when-will-this-winter-ever-end. As you know, I made a business, it's called Create Connection because that says loudly what I do. My son has always claimed that I am a People Collector. I suppose I am, and then one darns the people together where there is a hole. xx
Oe, jou verhaal klink baie bekend! Jy verwoord die ervaring so mooi. Ek hou van alleenheid en omdat ons nou al 20jaar in Nederland woon was dit maklik om goed weg te kruip vir mense (veral expats). En toe kom iemand uit die Kaap kuier met ‘n enorme kenniskring in Nederland. En sy sleep my saam na mense wat sy dink ek moet leer ken. En nou het ek skielik ‘n hele klomp nuwe vriende. En dit is nogal lekker. Dit gee in elk geval “energie”.