Thoughts about giving back

It's been about three and a half months since I arrived in the United States. Looking back, this has been a season of receiving. I traveled in other people's cars, saved on insurance because of someone's advice, and some weeks, a meal someone bought me was the best meal I had. I thought I came here alone, but there have been very few days I actually got through alone.

It was the same at work. My colleagues did a lot to help me find my footing. There was friction too, of course — it's people, after all. At first those moments stayed with me longer than they should have, but at some point I accepted it: nobody is perfect, and the people who helped me and the people I clashed with were mostly the same people. If that's true, which side I choose to remember is up to me.

The tension from The 48 Laws of Power

I've been reading The 48 Laws of Power and I'm nearly done. The book treats every favor as a transaction. Kindness has an agenda, debts get called in, and people who don't see the mechanics get played. Honestly, it's a useful book — I can't pretend people like that don't exist.

But something about it sat wrong with me the whole way through. Looking back at my three and a half months through the book's lens, the people who helped me must have been running some calculation. I've gone over it again and again, and they weren't. The colleague who drove me around, the person who walked me through insurance — there was nothing they stood to collect from me. It's not that the book is wrong; it's that the people it can't explain were right there around me.

So what does paying it back mean

"There's no free lunch" is probably true. And yet the people who bought me lunch never once handed me a bill. I spent a long time trying to make sense of that gap.

Here's where I've landed, for now. Returning a favor to the person who gave it is a transaction. Passing it on to the next person is generosity. The people who helped me were probably handing me something they once received from someone else.

Right now I don't have much to give. I'm still in the receiving season of this, and I can admit that. But I'm writing down this ledger of debts so I don't forget it. Someday I'd like to hand someone — someone as lost as I was — the same thing, probably with whatever skills I end up having. I don't know yet what shape that takes. I'm writing down that I don't know, too.