Fourth Form of Madness

Why is it that generally the less people have the more they give and the more people have the less they give?  This has always puzzled me about people.

I first started noticing and thinking about this question whilst I was backpacking through Asia with my husband when we were in our early thirties.  I still think of this time fondly when we just packed up our home and headed off with a vague plan and our belongings on our backs.  It was a time of freedom and adventure but most of all about learning.  I learnt a great deal about my self on that journey as their is nothing like travel for unhinging stubborn misconceptions you have created about yourself.

Anyway on these journeys we took a great many bus and train rides.  One of my favourite bus rides was on an old school bus in Lao (no “s” – the French added that not the people of Lao).  It was an old retired school bus, the seats were tattered and torn and some barely holding on.  It was a sweltering day and the only form of air conditioning were windows that would not stay closed.  The bus was packed to its capacity with locals and their chickens and pigs when we stepped on, I was just wondering where we were going to sit when out came the ‘little red chairs’.  Little plastic mini chairs that perhaps a skinny 5 year old could fit their butt on.  Down the aisle these little plastic chairs were placed and we all squeezed past each other to take our place.

I was mentally agitated by this as it was quite early in our journey and I had not yet become acclimatised to the different ways of different countries.  I was just completing my silent “health and safety” check in my head when the bus started up and began it’s eight hour (plus) journey down a bumpy dirt road.  Apparently the old school bus had no suspension as well based on the bumps and dips that were launching my little red chair precariously into the air.

I was in the midst of one of those culture shock travel moments, really stuck and struggling when suddenly a hand was thrust in front of me.  In it was some chicken, cooked and brought along for the journey by the kindly looking local to my left who had been early enough to secure a grown up seat.  We didn’t speak each others language but we didn’t need to.  For the next 30 mins or so, I got offered all the goodies they had packed along for their journey.  They offered all their foods with such simple and stunning generosity to me, a spoilt, grumpy westerner, grizzling about how her butt didn’t fit her seat.  It was a humbling moment and an often repeated one in our travels.  These people with just so little were just so willing to share what they had with us.  Drawing on my experience of bus and train travel in my home town this was a surreal experience.  Where I am from more often than not people do not even offer seats to pregnant women.  Generosity of spirit is a beautiful choice.

And then there was the time in Cuba, a country that suffers greatly from embargos placed on it by other countries.  I was an idealist sociology student heading off to experience a different way of social structure, a way I was intellectually certain (never a good assurance) was better than what I was used to.  My husband and I were backpacking through the country from the bottom to the top doing home stays here and there.  In this particular home stay, even the taxi driver didn’t want to let us out in the area it was so rough and run down.  Clinging to the old adage that “appearances are often deceiving” we ventured forth.  On the first day there, dazed and confused by the relentless intensity of the sun, I drunk the water offered to me at a local ice cream parlour.  Going for ice cream is a big pass time in Cuba and on this day it seemed that more than half that town had come to the parlour at the same time we did to escape the heat.  Instead of escaping the heat we waited out in it for at least 2 hours before we got inside.  The glass of water offered to me was my oasis in the dessert and I happily accepted the illusion.

There was no illusion of the effects of the water.  Within the hour my stomach sounded like it was tuning up for an orchestral performance and the instruments were way out of tune.  The next few days were not pretty.  I had taken all the supplies we had with us in our travel medicine kit and still there were no signs of cease fire.  The people we were staying with had very little.  Of all the things that were in shortage in the country at that stage pharmaceuticals were one of the hardest hit by the embargos (this opens up a whole ethical debate but for now I will not go there).

Just as I was trying to recall where we had packed our travel insurance medical emergency number the family we were staying with offered me their kick arse secret stash of anti-biotics they got from an uncle in the States.  I could not get over the generosity and kindness of these people.  All that had been denied and refused to them as a country, as a people, and still they gave to others in their time of need.  Such magnitude of spirit.  I was working for stockbrokers at this time in my life, they were some of the monetary richest people I have ever worked with.  Unfortunately for them, most of their spirits were suffering a perpetual drought.  Just one good drink of water and they might have been revived but as the old adage goes “… you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink”.

Generosity is a choice.  It is a choice of either selecting to connect or disconnect from a another being.  I truly do not believe that generosity of spirit is based on what you have and what you can spare for if that was honestly the case most people  would be giving a lot more.  And yet they actively select not to.   In fact, most get angry or agitated when you even talk of giving, like you have impinged on their “rights” and “freedom” and to make decisions of their own “free will”.  Does anyone know what those abstract words really mean?  If we give nothing else, we really owe it to ourselves and all other beings to at least give the gift of self study and really examine and ask ourselves what honestly stops us from giving?  Now there is a journey worth taking……….