Clarity for Teachers: Day 36
‘Buying ourselves nice things doesn’t help. Invest in giving.’
That year I spent travelling around Europe with my guitar, it got to November and I was in Amsterdam in the rain. I’d been on the road for seven weeks by now. It was the moment when I came closest to giving up and heading home.
Big cities are the worst, I was starting to learn. You just disappear into the noise. The Amsterdam police were strict — and puzzled. They’d stopped me the day before on a side street like this one and explained where I was allowed to play, so why hadn’t I followed their directions? (Just my luck to meet the same two cops again.) Well, the designated sites were all huge open spaces, fine for a twelve-piece Peruvian panpipe band, but useless for one voice and guitar with no amplification. But I took the warning and did as I was told, which is how I came to be playing on the cobbled expanse of Dam Square.
Sure enough, two hours went by and I’d made just twenty guilders, enough to cover my hostel bed that night, but nothing more. At least I’d had some solidarity from the guy with the stand selling birdseed for the pigeons. It was a charity thing, raising money for the homeless. He came from Manchester and the singer out of James used to eat at his family’s curryhouse.
The drizzle was coming on again and I was ready to pack it in, but then I thought, let’s give it one more song. So I started up playing Losing My Religion, and as I reached the first chorus, I saw a strange figure crossing the square in black clothes and a hat, carrying a huge Bible under his arm. He stopped at the birdseed stand, bought a bag and waved away the change, then threw half of it up in the air, so it landed on his hat and shoulders and outstretched arms, and for a few moments he was a statue flocked by pigeons. Then he came over to where my guitar case lay on the ground. I stepped back a little and looked away, like I usually did when someone stopped to put in money. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him take something from his Bible and put it in, and when he’d gone I realised it was a banknote.
‘Did you see what happened?’ the birdseed guy said, coming over.
‘Yeah, he just put a hundred guilder note in my case! That’s like … forty quid!’
‘No, but did you see? He pulled out another one first, a green one … that was thousand guilder note. Man, he was going to put that in your case!’ He shook his head. ‘You know, I’ve seen that guy cross the square every day that I’ve been here, and he’s never stopped before.’
I walked back to the hostel, not knowing what to feel. Was I supposed to laugh or cry? But I knew that I wasn’t heading back to England.
A year or two later, at university, I had a furious argument with one of my best friends about giving money to the homeless. He’d seen a guy begging with smart new trainers on, and he was telling me that there were people you shouldn’t give money to, since they were clearly fit and healthy and could get a proper job if they wanted. Naturally, I was the bleeding heart liberal, incensed at this, telling him you never know what mental health problems that guy might have, or who might have given him the trainers. Thinking about it, after I’d calmed down, it struck me that the heart of the matter is a refusal to stand in judgement: if I can’t give money to every beggar I see, then the only thing I can do in conscience is to be arbitrary, to give sometimes, with no judgement as to the worthiness of the recipient.
One reason for the importance of gift within religious traditions is that it frees you from the power of money — the matrix of exchange value and use value, the logic of profit and efficiency. In this sense, gift is closely related to sacrifice. By violating the assumption that one should be rational in seeking a return on one’s money, the hold of this rationality is broken — it becomes clear that there are many other things that one can do with money, or with anything for which money might be exchanged.
In the years since that visit to Amsterdam, I’ve seen enough of mental illness that I could easily retrofit a story around the man with the hat and the Bible full of banknotes. But this would be a speculation, and it would not account for the role that he played in my life.
Instead, twenty years later, when I heard a young man playing the guitar and singing in the corridors of Stockholm Central station, I turned back up the escalator to the nearest cash machine and took out a 500 kroner note, hoping I’d make it back before the security staff moved him on. You don’t hear many buskers nowadays, and in a country like Sweden where it’s easy to go from month to month without touching cash, I don’t even know how busking could work anymore. There were no pigeons around and no birdseed, I didn’t strike a pose, I just dropped the note gently in his case and walked off without looking back. He didn’t know that I had just received an unexpected gift from a relative, or that I once sang Losing My Religion in Dam Square. I don’t know what difference my banknote did or didn’t make in his life, or what story he might be telling twenty years from now about that day. I do know that we are, all of us, connected along threads of gift that reach behind us and ahead of us, further than we can see.
Västerås, 23 April, 2020
This is the thirty-sixth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
