Greed and Generosity

Please Call Me By My True Names is one of Thic Nhat Hanh’s most famous poems and I had a visceral rejection response to it when I first read it.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

Practicality

The nature imagery was ok.  I do believe in the circle of life, and I eat meat so I am comfortable with the idea that we all participate in a bit of a food web.  I mean, I identify a little more with Simon and Garfunkel’s El Condor Pasa.

I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail
Yes, I would
If I could
I surely would

I’d rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes, I would
If I only could
I surely would

I would rather be the swallow than a snail.  Who wouldn’t?  Except for Thich Nhat Hanh apparently.   Time to work on some non-identification and non-attachment.

The poem goes on.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

Revulsion

Hold up.  I absolutely revolted at the idea of being the pirate, the arms merchant or the politburo member.   I really felt strongly that these vile examples were not me.  And yet, are we not all human, with capability to hurt each other?  Most of us do not do so in such extreme ways and also most of us are not being shaped by such extreme forces.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

And this is another tough one.  “So I can see that my joy and pain are one.”  I’m familiar with the idea that in order to experience love, you have to have known loss.  But I haven’t yet been able to understand how positive and negative emotions are one.  Surely I can feel joy without pain, love without loss.  Unfavourable circumstances come to all of us eventually, so there is a balance, but do they really co-exist?

Generosity and Greed

And then I started to think about generosity.

When you are generous, you give away something that you would actually quite like to keep for yourself.  Billionaires who give away eye popping sums of money are less generous than a child who gives the last bite of his cookie to you.  This is clearly illustrated in the parable of the widow’s mite in which a poor widow who gives all she has is lauded as being the ideal of generosity compared to rich men who give from their excess.

The more I meditate on the idea that generosity cannot exist without greed, that they have to co-exist in the same moment in order to make generosity meaningful, the closer I come to understanding that joy and pain must co-exist in the same way.  I don’t yet see how, but I think it must be true.  Certainly the victims and villains of the previous poem are dependent on each other.  Without the arms merchant, there is no starving child and without people willing to starve children, there is no arms merchant.

Kid Test

I asked my kids – would I be generous if I gave you my nice juicy bell pepper?  They laughed (I have a pepper allergy and loathe them).  How about generously sharing with you a slice of birthday cake?  (I have no sweet tooth).  It was obvious to them and to me that I could NOT be generous without being greedy, at the same time.

Love and Vulnerability

Maybe for love, it’s about vulnerability.  You can’t truly, deeply love someone without opening yourself to them, and making yourself vulnerable feels pretty unsafe.  In a way, we decry young love as being immoderate and unwise, but the purity of love expressed by a 14 year old who throws their heart away with wild abandon, how they would remain all day and all night in the beloved’s presence if it were permitted.  How the briefest of separation is agony.  We say that’s not love, but isn’t that closer to the way our dog loves us than the way we more prudently and self-sufficiently love our friends and partners, guarding our true hearts from harm by limiting our vulnerability, even with our most intimate and beloved ones?  If we could learn to allow that vulnerability to co-exist with the love, how much wilder and more powerful would that love be, and unavoidably, how much more vulnerable to rejection would we be.

TL;DR

Positive emotions or impulses must co-exist with their “negative” opposites in order to have meaning.  Giving away something you are not greedy for (at least a little) is not generous; it’s like throwing out trash.