Month: November 2007

friendship, gifts, volunteer

The moment of giving

Christa Avampato

“Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment. — Jean de La Bruyere”

The saying “It’s all in the timing” tends to be related to a stroke of good luck, a serendipitous moment that occurs quite by accident with some great fortune attached to it. I am a huge fan of surprises. When I think about acts of kindness that I have experienced in my life, they came in the form of a surprise. My memory of the kindness has nothing to do with the actual gesture, but with the time that the kindness arrived.

My friend, Alex, is a fan of sending cards and little surprises in the mail. She sent me a magnet that I just love when I moved into my new apartment in New York. And she sent me a card during the summer I spent in Atlanta, which was miserable for a variety of reasons. She had no idea how much I needed a smile those days, though her timing was impeccable.

Even a well-timed, unsolicited compliment becomes an act of generosity. Occasionally I change out my picture on my blog or my Facebook page and I am always so touched when someone writes to me to say how much they like the new picture. The same goes for friends of mine who read my blog and reference it to me. I feel so touched when I know they’ve taken time out of their day to read what I’m thinking and writing about.

Simple phone calls do the trick, too. I am always excited to get a surprise call or voice message from someone I wasn’t expecting to hear from, especially when it’s not around a holiday or my birthday. I love those cards, emails, and messages that arrive just to say hi, for no reason in particular except to say “hey, I was thinking about you.”

As I consider gifts I’ll be giving this season I’ll be thinking about the experience they create, how much joy they’ll generate afterwards and hopefully for a long time to come. And this quote also gave me a third dimension to consider, timing. While the secret to a happy life may be to have low expectations, it may also be that we can generate happiness for others by providing unexpected generosity just when we sense that those around us need it most and expect it least.

gifts, retail

Granting wishes

Christa Avampato

The season of massive gift giving has arrived! And with the season comes the litany of holiday TV commercials. It’s tough for retailers to cut through with a unique message, though some are doing just that. I saw one this morning that made me reconsider the list I’ll be checking twice. In the past, we’ve focused so much on getting gifts for people, the focus being the product we wrap up in shiny paper.

As retailers shift their business model to dually focus on the product and the experience of purchasing the product, consumers also seem to be focused on not just giving a gift but creating an experience for the recipient. Granting a wish.

We do put ourselves into the frenzy of mass purchasing – pictures of consumers dashing into retailer doors that open at 6:00am or earlier. But if we take a look back, and think about someone as a whole person, and find a way to give them something that’s not just a box with a bow on it. One of these commercials shows a family that redid their dad’s garage because he spends so much time touching up everyone else’s room. Another one shows a little girl who loves fashion though until this year has had to wear a uniform to school. They bought her new sets of fun, funky clothes to celebrate her transition to a new school in which she can wear her own outfits. Both sets of gifts celebrate the core of the person they are given to.

We spend a lot of time gifting, though how much time do we really spend paying tribute to people who make such a difference in our lives? If we focused on this later part more often, we may find our gift lists transformed from simple packages to truly extraordinary gifts, and incidentally may find that the holiday season is filled with a lot more joy and a lot less stress.

Life

On NYC sights and sounds: Having their say

Christa Avampato

What I love about serendipity is that it affords me a wonderful surprise that makes me feel connected to the world. It helps me begin to see the rhyme and reason that threads through one day’s activities to the next. On Tuesday evening, I was late getting back from work and I wasn’t able to get down to the Chelsea Barnes and Noble to see one of my favorite authors, Amy Bloom.

I needed to get a book for work so I just walked down to my neighborhood B&N. I was poking around and stumbled upon another event happening – this one for StoryCorps. I had heard one of their stories on This American Life the previous Friday on NPR. The story was moving, so I decided to stick around and see what this event was about.

I wish I could do justice to the personal stories that were shared – a NYC bus driver who helped a lone elderly woman find the restaurant her friends were at. It turned out that that woman had just been diagnosed with cancer and she was incredibly appreciative of this bus driver’s kind efforts. A WWII vet and his grandson talked about the battle that their loved one faced with Alzheimer’s. A woman talked about how she met her husband; they were one of the first StoryCorps stories recorded, and the husband had just passed away from pancreatic cancer.

StoryCorps’s mission is very simple: record the quintessential stories of everyday American people and create an archive of the stories to be accessed by future generations. They record these stories through two NYC locations, and a few mobile units around the country. It’s a 40-minute unscripted interview between two people who know one another well and usually revolves around the big questions in life. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to sign up. At the end of the session, a CD is given to the participants, and one goes to the Library of Congress if the interviewees would like to have that happen. To date, 15,000 stories have been recorded.

You have to hear these stories for yourself – they will change your life. They’ll make you a kinder person. They’ll make you appreciative of the little sweet moments in life in a way that you couldn’t before hearing the stories. Telling our stories, and sharing them, may be the most important work we ever do.

You can listen to a sampling of the stories and sign up for an interview slot at StoryCorps’s website: http://www.storycorps.net/. Check it out!

Life

Advertising what’s not there

Christa Avampato

I was grateful to find a parking space on 95th Street despite that it was 6:30. Most of the time, the spots are gone right at 6pm when parking becomes legal on the right side of the street. It was colder than I planned so I was rushing up the hill to 92nd Street, and had to stop to snap this photo to the left.

Several things could have happened to cause someone to put this posting on the widow of his car. 1.) The car’s been broken into before or 2.) He’s completely panicked about having a car in New York.

Either way, I understand. The news lately is enough to make anyone paranoid. This is what our lives as car owners in New York have come to. Forget getting the club, installing an alarm. Deter them with honesty, and keep them from wasting time trying to find the good stuff where it doesn’t exist. A last ditch effort to keep misfortune from heading our way.

On the way home today, I heard on NPR that Zipcar and Flexcar have merged. The CEO wants to build a $1B business convincing Americans to think differently about car ownership. According to data, 50% of urban car owners could have their driving needs met and spend far less money by using Zipcar. That would cut down on congestion, remove pollution, and decrease road rage. Not to mention what it could do to drop the number of all crimes related to car ownership. Imagine if we could remove half of all the cars from urban areas in America. Then maybe my neighbor wouldn’t have to be quite so paranoid about his radio, or lack thereof.