Meaningful Returns

My wife works for the YMCA in downtown Raleigh, which is the greatest YMCA in all the land. (Yeah I’m biased; so are you.) Anyways, every year around this time the YMCA raises gobs and gobs of money to help to kids in Raleigh who generally don’t get much from their communities except bootstrap exhortations and lame excuses. I hate asking for money. I hate it, hate it, hate it. But I ask people every year to give money to the YMCA, and I’m always glad I did.

And every year when I do this I get steamrolled with this question–not by anyone else, but by my own head: Why does giving matter???

It’s an impossible question to tackle in one blog post, but I think one of the most overlooked and yet important pieces to the answer is simply this: When you give a meaningful amount of money away, an amount that actually makes a significant difference in your lifestyle, you are giving up control.

Control–at least at a sort of macrocosmic level–is an illusion. The complexity of the universe prohibits it dramatically. And when we willingly choose to give up something that generally contributes to the illusion (significant amounts of money), then we are aligning ourselves with reality. And the more we do that, the more we are freed up to see that in reality, there are people who need that money more than we do.

It’s the most incredible feedback loop I’ve ever seen.