Not long after my eldest sister died in 2014, my wife Alexandra wrote to a Zen teacher living in Kyoto to ask about various religious paths. Notably, she and I had crafted that email in such a way that it included criteria whose goal was to help her to determine what could be a suitable religion for someone with her particular temperament.

The Zen teacher was not wrong to point out something we’d overlooked. He wrote: “Rather than thinking about what this or that religion can offer you, shouldn’t you consider what you’re willing to give to this path?”

I’m not sure that we fully grasped his point about the value of devotional yoga then, about the importance of self-sacrifice then, but I’m certain that we have since.

Endemic in our culture is a peculiar way of putting things backward. None of us want to be lonely yet many of us are terribly so, so we think about who could come to save us. We pine for where we might belong or for the one who will finally love us. Instead, wouldn’t it be wiser to ask: “Whom can I befriend? Who needs my help?”

Or we may, while reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, lament the loss of social capital during the last period of the twentieth century and surely into the twenty-first. Where, we think, are the clubs? The organizations? The churches? And yet, wouldn’t we be better served to go looking for what’s already out there or else to create some group or organization that could help to revitalize social capital?

Or we may wish to be beyond all suffering and so we, poor wretches that we are, say to the spiritual teacher that she must bestow her grace on us. Yet shouldn’t we instead say: “What spiritual practice can I rigorously undertake so as to know who I really am?”

Rather than regarding spirituality in terms of getting, let’s turn the matter around and open our hearts such that we give, and give, and give–and then give some more. “I am large,” Whitman once intoned, “I contain multitudes.” How true could this statement be for you?