I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Perhaps one reason why overall happiness and satisfaction with life appears to improve at midlife into late life is because that’s a time when people turn from trying to achieve conventional success towards a less self-centered stance, towards asking “what can I give?” from “what can life give to me?”
For those who accept the challenge, midlife can mark the start of a turn towards generosity, towards love as action, and towards contributing. This can be a time of generativity, the life stage that Erik Erikson proposed begins in middle adulthood. The question a person entering this stage asks is, “How can I make my life meaningful to younger generations, to the society I live in? What legacy will I leave?”
Fromm writes that giving makes you wealthy:
In the sphere of material things giving means being rich. Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much. The hoarder who is anxiously worried about losing something is, psychologically speaking, the poor, impoverished man, regardless of how much he has. Whoever is capable of giving of himself is rich. He experiences himself as one who can confer of himself to others.
I have seen this in my closest relations. The wealthiest are not those with the biggest brokerage account balances, but those who are most generous with what they have.
What matters most is not giving material things, however, writes Fromm:
The most important sphere of giving, however, is not that of material things, but lies in the specifically human realm. What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other—but that he gives him of that which is alive in him, he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him.
This two-sided operation of giving happens most obviously in love; “love is a power which produces love,” says Fromm. But it’s not only in love where authentic giving results in the giver’s receiving something back: “The teacher is taught by his students, the actor is stimulated by his audience, the psychoanalyst is cured by his patient—provided they do not treat each other as objects, but are related to each other genuinely and productively.”
This reminds me of philosopher Nel Noddings’ definition of care, which she sees as a relational process between the one-caring (the carer) and the cared-for. The carer must be engrossed in the cared-for’s needs with receptive attention. The carer shows motivational displacement—shifting her objectives and focus towards what the cared-for needs rather than pursuing her own objectives. And finally there is reciprocity, where the cared-for recognizes and responds to the care. The cared-for gives back with appreciation, love, acknowledgement, and flourishing.