Today’s musings are on giving. Below you’ll find a link to the Academy’s free Dear Poet booklet—the same one that includes Akshara’s work. Their generosity made me think about what real giving looks like. The whole Dear Poet project is a gift of magnificent proportions. Award-winning poets give their time recording themselves reading a poem that they wrote. The Academy provides lesson plans to help teachers support children in writing a letter. Teachers prepare students with an understanding of poetry and a vocabulary for communicating about it. Volunteers at the Academy read many hundreds of children’s letters. Every student is sent a certificate for participating. Then, for a few kids, the poet writes them a personal reply. The booklet is beautifully laid out, proofread, and made available for free. It is a project that takes the Academy most of the year, from February when they start accepting letters to October when they make the booklet available. There is no fee for the kids to participate. It seems it comes purely from a love of poetry and a wish to share it. A friend recently reminded me of Jonathan Haidt’s line in The Happiness Hypothesis: “It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.” The Academy seems to be getting those relationships right—and perhaps the giving is building their happiness. It’s tempting to analyze giving transactionally—what’s in it for them? My yoga-meditation teacher, the Walking Yogi, Nishit Patel, calls this “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” He agrees that isn’t a recipe for happiness. I’m starting to think it isn’t at the heart of human nature either. Nature is one long act of generosity. In my neighborhood, chestnuts are plonking down and squirrels are squirreling them away. The sun pours out energy. I breathe air that costs nothing. Water from Mt. Hood’s Bull Run watershed arrives at my sink thanks to years of quiet work by people I’ll never meet. When we align ourselves with that flow—by giving—we feel part of life, not separate from it. Halloween is coming, and many of us will happily hand out candy just to see delighted faces. But we’re giving all the time. Every inhalation nourishes our lives, and every exhalation is a gift of what plants need to live. According to my googling, our human exhalations offer 100 times the concentration of carbon dioxide that plants thrive on compared to the ambient atmosphere. The work we do—paid or not—can be viewed as a contribution. A swami once told me that no matter what work we do, we will be happier in it if we clearly conceive of one person we are doing that work for. Even our facial expressions are gifts; a smile or nod can lift someone’s day. If we’re always giving, maybe the practice is simply to notice it. Awareness turns obligation into connection, and connection often feels like happiness. I hope this message met someone where they are today.
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