Abundance

(and that voice in your head that says 'not enough')

It’s July and we are drowning in fruit. Our peach tree, almost always reliable, produced hundreds of pounds of perfect fruit, all at the same time. Over the years we’ve learned to cope with the windfall of peaches, but this year our plum tree, after many years of producing only enough fruit to feed the backyard squirrels suddenly made so many plums that they began falling, like rain, in the evening. Add in a 10-day heat wave and suddenly we had both trees ripening at the exact same time and buckets of ripe fruit on hand. 

I have made many jars of jam, processing the fruit with boiling water on days when it was well over 100 degrees outside, thinking about the generations of women canning fruit in similar conditions without the luxury of central air conditioning. There’s been pie and fruit tarts and even the dehydrator was called into action. My husband has frozen many bags of peaches for the winter. As I write this, the plums are still thudding dramatically to the ground. 

And even so, as I hand out bags of the remaining fruit to our neighbors and friends, there’s a tiny voice in the back of my head wondering if we have ‘enough’ to share. The fruit, after all, is a finite quantity. The harvest will end soon. I hear this relentless inner voice and I cringe a little bit. If I’ve ever had ‘enough’ of something to share, it would be peaches and plums this July.  

Which is a long way of saying that is why I want to explore generosity in this newsletter, hopefully with a community of readers who also wonder how we often live in such abundance and yet struggle with the impulse to be generous. 

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I would benefit from making generosity an intentional practice, not an afterthought. That sense of scarcity is a deeply ingrained habit and this July’s harvest has made it abundantly clear (pun intended) that it often bears little relationship to truth. 

I hope What Gives can create a place for an honest discussion about generosity and a place to share stories that will inspire all of us to step up and be both more generous and more imaginative about what we have to offer each other. 

My favorite definition of generosity is from the University of Notre Dame’s Science of Generosity Project. They define generosity as “ the virtue of giving good things to others freely and abundantly.”  

So, to start us off, here’s a question: “What is one good thing that you have received from others? Why was that an important gift?” Please share in the chat.