One morning as I was coming out of sleep I heard a voice say, “Give all you have to love and you will be all things.”
Give…Be…Know…

“But,” you may say, “why bother? I’m very busy. What does the GiveGet Nation really mean to me? What will I get?”

1) You’ll have the opportunity to see that your stuff gets to do its stuff—there isn’t the regret, “what a shame,” etc., that a thoughtful person feels about throwing out perfectly good stuff. It’s satisfying to the soul.

2) If you’re a recipient you’ll have the chance to thrill the giver by letting them know what the stuff means to you, how it will be used. Everybody gets the sense of stewarding, sharing, thanking, etc.

3) You get to pass the word. You know somebody has just the thing that’s needed, or somebody needing just that, you’re marrying resources and agents. There’s too much information out there; we need to be each other’s eyes and ears.

4) And whether you’re a giver, a getter, or a word-passer, you’re know improving the quality of life in the habitat. That much less ore has to be mined, that many fewer trees have to be cut down, that much less goes into landfill or the ocean or the toxic waste dump.

Nature isn’t separate from us; we, too, are nature. Bees make honey, silkworms make thread, human beings make connections. By helping to maintain currency we transcend consumerism.

It’s a little like “breaking bread.” We take a helping and hand the platter on to the next member of the human family. GiveGet is the human tradition. Children outgrow perfectly good clothes and we hand them down.

You know what else we hand down? Eternal verities, killer recipes, and classic jokes. A young company or a neighborhood school has use for equipment some other enterprise has outgrown. Thoughtless discarding of good stuff is the counterpart of thoughtless littering. People who wouldn’t dream of tossing debris out a car window throw unopened bags and boxes of food in the dumpster. The largest category of trash in our landfills is discarded clothing. We pay for disposable dusting cloths and throw away old T-shirts.

KING ARTHUR AS BEGGAR: We read, “Look, Jane, look” in the first grade and she read real stories. One story concerned a woman who was baking cake when a hungry beggar came to the window. She grudgingly offered to give him a piece when it finished, but when it came out of the oven it smelled so good she was loathe to give him a piece, so she cut him a chunk of bread that was just a little too generous, so made an adjustment.

He thanked her for the crust, and as he walked away his cloak fell away from his face, and she saw that her beggar was King Arthur in disguise.

For a long time it was customary for people to cut the buttons off an expensive piece of clothing before giving it away. Do we think somebody is going to buy buttons for a used jacket or dress? Is there a kid somewhere looking for an incomplete jigsaw puzzle or a single shoe? If you’re discarding a trashy book or a product that may be carcinogenic, don’t pass it on. The poor have all the broken stuff, trash and toxins they need.

“GiveGet” is the upside of “This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you.”
This gesture is going to help me more than you know.
Come to think of it, somebody somewhere knew that giving is getting. “My pleasure,” we say.
“Not at all.” “Think nothing of it.” “De nada.” There is no need to thank me. Doing something for you was easy.

We know. We always knew. It was a pleasure to help. To get something because we were taller. To carry your firewood, to rub your back, to bring you a covered dish when you were ailing. We loved the light in your eyes when we surprised you. We loved the movement, the giving and getting.

When we were small we were truly thankful to be carried when our legs got tired. To be read to. If somebody interfered with the bully or mediated the understanding, we experienced relief. It was our pleasure, and theirs.

Giving and getting are sides of the same coin. Generosity and appreciation well up from the heart. It isn’t a gift, it’s the thought behind it, we say, and laugh cynically. Whazzat? The gift was an immaculate conception? The thought—what did that give birth to?

It isn’t the size of the gift that matters, that’s what we should say; it’s the intensity or purity of the feeling or the aptness of the gesture. Or the originality of the idea, or the time and thought that went into it.

“Actions speak louder than words.” The deed trumps all the talk in the world. Marriage vows, blood-brother oaths, business deals. . . . None of these is worth the paper it’s written on if we aren’t galvanized into action. ```````````