Giving from the heart, not the pocketbook

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the
spirit in which it is offered.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)

Gift-giving has become an ugly blotch on the face of humanity.

At one time, giving a gift was a sign of love or respect, an indication that the giver wanted to touch the heart of the receiver in some personal way.

In today's industrial and post-industrial communities, gift-giving is a duty, often committed with some regret or annoyance.

When giving a gift is not done from the heart and as a sign of personally reaching out to the receiver, lives are being controlled by industries who pull strings like marionette masters, through advertising, to tell us what is right. Their interests are in the welfare of their shareholders, not in their customers.

Many of us don't know how to give a give from the heart. The easiest form of heart-giving is of our time, instead of our cash. It's easy, just promise to do something for the person whose life you want to touch. It should be something that will make the receiver's life a little better, somehow.

You can't buy love, and you can't buy respect of the kind that is earned. Only acts of the heart can accomplish that. They inevitably involve time, not money.

If the only gift you can give involves paying out cash, your life is being controlled by large industries who want you to be their cash slaves.

You will miss out on what loves is about if you don't know how to show it.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to show the difference between love and commerce to those who may have lost their compass of the heart.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl