Paul Sassone

This is the season of giving:

Give me your business.

Give me a big discount.

It’s often difficult to distinguish giving from getting.

Examples of unselfish giving thus can be more rare than we imagine.

When I want to savor selflessness I remember an elderly lady I met her a few years ago.

I had been hired as a freelance writer to do a series of stories for the Greater Chicago Food Depository newsletter. Each story was a profile of a food pantry affiliated with the depository and the volunteers, staff and food recipients. The Greater Chicago Food Depository works with more than 600 food pantries and soup kitchens.

Hunger in America is more common than you might think.

I was walking around this food pantry, talking to people, taking notes when I noticed a stooped, elderly woman just staring at a table of produce.

Was she in some distress? Did she need help?

I asked if I could be of assistance.

“No,” she replied. “I just don’t know if I like this.” She pointed at what was some kind of green on the table.

If you don’t like it when you get home, don’t eat it, I suggested.

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that,” she replied. “If I took it and didn’t eat it I’d be depriving someone else who might like it.”

She didn’t take it.

A small thing?

Sure.

But a natural, instinctive example of unselfish giving. And as such it is a pleasant memory and a reminder of actual giving.

This small act is a kind of an antidote to all the Black Fridays, Cyber Mondays and Gimme Wednesdays with which we are bombarded at this time of the year.

—’Tis the season for acts of kindness–