Give It Back
I knew a man from the Kanza Nation in Oklahoma who used to say that what puzzled him most about white people is that they never retire.
“When our people turn fifty,” he said, “we start making sure the next generation knows how to do things, fix things, remember things. But white people hoard their knowledge as though they’re never going to die.”
The Buddha often spoke about this hoarding instinct, and the importance of challenging it through cāga — a word usually translated as generosity, but which also means relinquishment: the willingness to let go of what we falsely believe belongs to us.
We tend to think of generosity as something we do only with time and money. Coach Little League. Donate to charity. Give a dollar to an unhoused person. And yes, these are good deeds! But they can also leave our basic understanding of the world untouched. We might still think: this is mine, and I am choosing to give it away.
Cāga asks us to look more deeply. What if our knowledge, our talents, our resources, even our lives, are things passing through us, entrusted to our care for just a little while?
When I was younger, I desperately wanted people to recognize my musical talent. Eventually, I realized that the question wasn’t whether I had talent, but what that talent was for.
I’d been given a voice, a mother who taught me music, a father who taught me poetry. Was I really going to spend those gifts on something as cheap as recognition?
These days, I think of music as something I am safeguarding for others: fragments of story, melody, and feeling that have come through me but don’t really belong to me.
The world doesn’t belong to us. We belong to the world. Whoever you are, find a way to give it back. It's a much happier way to live.
As always, if you’d like to be held through your own process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.
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