A reader made a comment in a letter yesterday that beautifully captures this whole business of how the “physics of giving” works. After describing briefly her career path, and how she’d had the opportunity help many co-workers in her company find good positions that suited their talents (and had herself been blessed with a meteoric rise, leading to her being able to retire “at the ripe old age of 32”), she noted,
“I always seemed to end up meeting the right people who take an interest in me …”
This is exactly true. When you live with generosity, great and powerfully positive things just seem to happen. As Ernesto puts it, when you give as a way of life, “then very, very profitable things begin to happen.”
Sometimes I think of this as The Law of Left Field: there’s the world we see — the people, events and circumstances we’re paying attention to — and then there’s this whole other area of the universe called “Left Field,” the 99.9 percent that we’re not paying attention to or noticing at all. And when we’re living a life of generosity, all sorts of value showers down on us from that unnoticed, unseen place. We find a critical lead or make a crucial connection, or a golden opportunity drops into our lap, or we have some incalculably valuable thing come to us, not from the people or places we were maybe expecting or hoping for it to come from, but . . out of left field.
This is what happens to Joe in Chapter 13, and while the book is fictional, this is the kind of thing we see happen in real life, all the time. I‘ve seen it happen dozens of times, probably hundreds, and I’ll bet you have, too.
And of course, while it seems coincidental, it never is.