Generosity

Blog26:

TODAY weekend show highlighted a story of a twenty two year-old woman who was born with a rare illness … one that attacks, weakens, and finally debilitates body organs.  The most recent casualty in her lived-long fragile life was her kidneys.  In five years they will need to be replaced to keep death away, her doctors told.  ‘Lucky’ for her, modern medicine would allow transplantation of said very sick kidneys should there be a matching organ/kidney donor.  As soon as this was pronounced, she began a plea for one through the Facebook social media.  Lo and behold, and to her surprise, a childhood friend responds, gets tested, approved, and pronounced a healthy, best possible match.  The friends reunited and underwent the surgery. As soon as the recipient and donor successfully came out of the procedure, both could not stop telling their ‘give-and-take’, ‘plea-response’ and ‘death-life’ journeys of generosity.

Generosity … kindness … bigheartedness … what inspires and moves us to act upon it? 

For the childhood friend, who gave what she could have kept to preserve her own healthy life, it was an enormous risk embarked upon.  Results, you ask?  Not only did that act of charity put everyone who knew her in awe, but it also allowed someone, a friend, to have another leash on life.  Best of all that came out of it, nothing more was expected back in return.  Simply that – a gift.

We truly never know what links vicariously or personally experienced stories might spark.  The feature story did immensely touch me, and reminded me of a few people in my own life – one marching after another in the privacy of my mind’s window,  who gave unconditionally of themselves so that I might keep going … get somewhere in life, and perhaps, just perhaps,  return such kindness bestowed willingly to me.

Most vivid in my mind’s eye is the sacrifice of my Lola Atang in keeping me and two brothers, (what could I recall), from an abandonment of some sort.  It wasn’t very clear to me how or why the situation came to its course.  What was clear was there we were … on our own.  Somehow, we survived from day to day.  In one instance, we did find ourselves in a dark, dank, and marginal, though secure room with a very ‘small window to the world’ from where I saw life unfold.  From there, I remember having been surrounded by both familiar and strange people keeping us afloat.  I stayed in that room by myself sometimes.  It allowed my young impregnable mind to aimlessly and frequently wonder about life in general and in specifics.  One other ‘survival habitat’ that Lola Atang found for us was an open ground … open to weather elements, cold nights, in a  papag, a native slat bed, underneath one’s home.  It was opened up to us by some generous soul she knew, and who gave us permission to use for I couldn’t recall, how many months.  To a child, everything was an adventure; that was the mindset I took, anyway.  That was that, no questions needed to be asked.  But even more than the frequent habitat change, I wondered silently as well then, how Lola Atang navigated the city-at-risk, and convinced other kindhearted souls and generous benefactors to share with us sustaining nourishment, medicine, and other life basics.  There’s more to tell, but this suffices for now.

I’d never know the stark and the true reasoning for the many incidents in my young life, for sure.  What I do know is that generosity impacted life.  The generosity of those unsung souls, one like Lola Atang, imprinted goodness in me about people I knew and didn’t know.  Such seems to be the wonderful wheel of giving and receiving, I reckon.  We do kind acts, we sympathize, we thoughtfully think and act, we help someone, we reflect compassion in our lives day to day, if and when an opportunity finds us to respond on any given day and time. 

          Generosity is a powerful outpouring of the heart molded richly in love for others – someone we may or may not know.  While we can’t truly understand the force that moves it to pour out, we can’t imagine any other acts of love like it - a gift that keeps on giving and rewarding!