Generosity and Free Aren’t the Same Thing

My friend Joel is a smart cookie, so in appreciation I stole his line about generosity and free not being the same thing. I hope we stay friends.

I often find free to be tricky. Free can mean a taste, a sample, a sneak peak, but sometimes it’s just dismissible. I don’t need any koozies with giant logos, thank you.

But generosity is hard to dismiss. It can be free (thanks Joel), or it can be more than what you paid for, more than what you expected. As in hand-me-downs if your kids don’t mind them, or dessert on the house because your dinner order took longer than expected.

In a world of “I’m only going to do what I’m paid for or what’s expected of me“, free and generous are frequently homeless.

If the common denominator is giving (and shouldn’t it?), it doesn’t always have to be free. And although free and generous aren’t the same thing, we are almost always free to be generous.