It's All a Gift

Faith has never come to me easily. If you give me a task — meditate, wash dishes, whatever — I’m an extremely hard worker. But if you tell me to trust in something greater than myself, I get squirrelly. I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors, after all, who experienced this world as an uncaring, unprotected place.

But as I get older, I see the limits of trying to live a good life through hard work alone. I see the “spiritual cramp,” as Thomas Merton put it, of trying to earn happiness solely through my own efforts. Because the truth is: no one earns anything alone in life. It’s all given as a gift. The body with which we toil. The mind with which we scheme. It’s all here on donation.

This is why the Buddha taught that we should develop faith by practicing generosity. For when we show up in service, giving not just our money, but our time, care, and talents, we see that what we thought we knew of life is but a small sliver of what it truly is. When we give, we see that it’s all a gift, and we participate in the magic of creation itself.

You may have seen Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, often portrayed as a pyramid, which suggests that we should figure out our material lives before we address our spiritual ones. On one level it’s true: you can’t talk philosophy to a starving person. But on another, it isn’t: there’s no point at which any amount of money or security will be enough until we’ve comprehended the truth that we’re all just passing through.

Start to shift your values accordingly. Perhaps a job or relationship or your sense of where you should be in life isn’t going according to plan, but can you see the miracle of having these challenges in the first place, the miracle of the trillions of cells in your body working together as you figure out your triggers and taxes? Perhaps your truest job here is not to do, but to witness, and to wonder.

Painting by Theodor von Piloty