Giving has a bit of an underbelly. There’s the part of giving where you think about the recipient, and the part where you think about yourself. These parts get muggy and overlap. Very often, they’re impossible to tease apart, making a stubborn, knotted necklace, tangled up in its own hooks and pendants.
A couple years ago, I gifted some hours of volunteer work to my son’s private school, over and above the school’s required amount. Far enough removed from the situation, I now acknowledge (confess?) that I was secretly fulfilling an obligation to the school—extra volunteering was my private gesture of thanks. My extra hours appeared noble, but our family had earlier received financial aid to help cover our son’s tuition, so in some ways I felt that I was paying a debt. You see what I mean by an underbelly. Cracks in the veneer.
I am told that an exquisite freedom comes with self-forgetfulness, when we channel all our thinking into an other-centered space, when both the benefits and the pains of giving become simply incidental. And it’s true. When I dwell too long in the me-centered space, I’m flooded with anxiety and fear. When I dwell in the other-centered space, I locate joy.
But me-centered space is still important. I can’t obliterate it. If I do, I’ll self-sabotage by erasing my boundaries and my identity. There’s also no longevity if I sacrifice myself to a cause without first weighing my mental, emotional and physical resources.
I fiddle with the same scale when I make career choices. As I sift and measure my motives, I always inhabit the tension between giving and its underbelly. How much of this work serves others? (To give, to pour out, to express myself in worship.) How much of this work is for me? (To preserve my sanity, my bank account, my health.)
I often start out by answering the first question, all wound up in a ball of enthusiasm and good cheer, idealism and high hopes. I take the high road with a good heart. Then I inevitably hit an obstacle and it feels like I’m drifting back into that second lane of reasoning. This has actually ended up making a bunch of career starts and stops for me, and has inhibited me from committing to many things for the long haul.
There’s that time I thought I might become a campus minister. And that other time I thought I might become a counselor. And the other time that I thought I’d be a high school teacher. And that time I thought I’d become a foster parent—well, that I did end up accomplishing, but still it didn’t last beyond a decade. In fact, none of my jobs (beyond parenting my biological children) have ever lasted beyond a decade.
Each new career venture becomes one more in a pattern of strong starts and poor finishes, leaving a trail of good intentions in my wake. The counselor dream died when I realized that I am a bad listener. The high-school teacher dream died twice – both times because I essentially deemed it too much work for too little pay. Marriage distracted me from the campus minister dream. And the foster parent venture ended twice due to external circumstances.
In truth, I’m wrong to describe these false starts as drifts back into selfishness or moments of weakness. The end of each false start was a watering hole—a moment of self-discovery or the advent of an opportunity. And with each false start, I pick myself up, dust myself off, and look for new ways to give cheerfully without obliterating the me-space.
In jerky fits and bursts, I still quest for the sweet spot that Frederick Buechner so aptly and famously describes as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” It’s possible, he says, to give, and to feed giving’s underbelly, and not be torn.
So in my wandering, my zigging and zagging from giving to taking to creating to consuming, I’m straining to hold the course, and straddle two lanes. To play the long game in altruism, we must integrate care for self with care for other.
I have a chronic case of career wanderlust, paired with pour-out-my-life-itis. Wandering and giving, albeit imperfectly joined, are my continuities.