The strength of Giving

With the Christmas spirit in the air, it is also a time to remind ourselves of the spirit of Giving. In this rapidly changing world, we are able to easily communicate with each other using the new high tech methods. The irony is though that the communication is missing from our lives rapidly. Given that, it is hard to trust our next door neighbor. It is obviously affecting the tendency of giving. If the beneficiary starts thinking that the donor is a fool and can be manipulated easily to make more and more gains, it is natural that the donor wants to stop donating and think about himself/herself first. 

In old times, I think there were less resources available but at least in India there was more tendency to Give to the community. We can still see and hear about the access to free drinking water, food and temporary shelter, which was made available for pilgrims. The ritual of distributing free food in form "prasaad", "lungar" and many more ways to donate food at religious places is well known. 

There are many people who still show the spirit of giving now also and the world is "maintained" really by them  but the "fashion" of thinking about "me" first is increasing rapidly. "Giving" is considered to be a sign of weakness or even foolishness by many. 

In reality, giving has a special strength. In fact, it is a beautiful manifestation of strength. Unfortunately it is always underestimated. When we talk about the nature's strength, we talk mostly about hurricanes, floods, droughts, cyclones, earthquakes and many other similar natural calamities. We realize the nature's strength only after such natural calamities. After all these natural calamities make us realize how small we are. It only takes few seconds for nature to destroy an architectural wonder or even a whole city. On the flip side though, nature is equally generous and supremely strong. It has magical rains, winds, clouds and what not. It pours its Giving energy on all of us at all the times. It provides us water, food, shelter, clothing and what not! It has abundant mercy.  If nature forgets to "give" we suffer from lack.  Surprisingly we easily feel scared of nature's power when it stops giving but we hardly appreciate its giving. In fact, we think that taking from nature is our right. We start snatching nature's resources without giving back to it. The consequences of only "taking" are equally bad on both sides. When we forget giving, nature forgets it as well. 

Only a strong, self sufficient person can think beyond his/her own troubles or scarcity and takes that difficult step of giving others. Universe has everything in abundance. If we think about lack, it is always abundant too. One simple example of it is food. A poor person can feel the lack of basic food just enough to fulfill his appetite, A middle class person can feel the lack of fancy food. Even a rich person can feel lack of a particular style or a food, at times lack of simplicity in his/her food. So  scarcity is a sad truth but also it is all about a feeling. If one thinks in scarcity, he/she can never feel the drive to give. The insecurity to lose what we have will never allow us to share what we have. The spirit of giving is not insecure. It is strong. It has faith. It has hope. Most importantly it has the strongest power ever and it is love! 

By giving, if you are thinking that you are helping another person then you are not completely right. You are in fact helping yourself. Making yourself a stronger person. Who knows if that good deed will come back to you one day or not but as of today, you have earned that power to be one of the universe's because universe is all about giving.