Generous without the invoice

Most advice about generosity arrives with a receipt stapled to it.

Help people and they will help you. Share what you know and it will return as reputation. Make introductions and one day someone will introduce you. Be kind to the junior person, because the junior person may one day be the one deciding.

All of that is true often enough to be useful. It is also slightly strange, because of what it quietly implies: that if nothing comes back, the giving was a poor investment, and perhaps should not have happened.

Picture an old shopkeeper in the Muttrah souq in Muscat who walks a lost visitor three lanes over to the shop they were actually looking for, a competitor's, and then walks back to his own stall. There is no return on that. The visitor will fly home next week. Nobody else saw it.

He did it anyway, and he probably did not think about it for more than a second.

What if that were the normal version, and the transactional one the odd exception? Generosity as something you do because you can, not as a down payment on something you want.

The generous people I can think of do not seem to be keeping score. They also seem, on the whole, to be the more contented ones, and I am not sure which causes which. Possibly both. Choosing to give when nothing requires it is a small reminder that you have room to spare, and that you are the one deciding how to use it.

That is worth something on its own.

It does not need an invoice.