Putting Proximity Back Where It Belongs
This is the third essay in the second half of Taming the Gift, where the project turns from naming what has tamed the gift to recovering what might set it free. To learn more about the project, visit here.
In the first essay in this series, we contrasted two versions of the good Samaritan: the one many of us first heard of in Sunday school and the less domesticated, more demanding version Ivan Illich gave us. The Sunday school version asks only that we help those in need, and it is always told in a way that fits comfortably inside the lives we already have. Illich’s is much harder, offering one of the fullest pictures we have of what a gift is and a vivid reminder of the role proximity plays in it. Unlike the priest and the Levite, the Samaritan did not keep his distance; it was this movement toward the other, whoever they happen to be, that created the bond between the two strangers. It is this inclination toward proximity that the gift depends on; and it is one of those unruly things that modernity, given the chance, managed to subtract.
In much the same way that Illich asks us to grapple with a less domesticated version of this familiar parable, the author and activist Bryan Stevenson asks us to reckon with what proximity actually demands of us. Many of us have heard his message about the ‘power of proximity’ since the 2014 release of his bestselling memoir. Perhaps we’ve heard it in his TED talks, his opening plenary at Skoll, university commencements, and keynote after keynote at one annual gathering or another. For myself, each time I have encountered Stevenson’s message, I have wondered whether it was the more demanding version of proximity that we in our sector were embracing or a safer, clichéd version that fit nicely in a Sunday school curriculum.
If we read Stevenson closely enough we discover a proximity that is not the warm and familiar kind we feel toward the people already close to us. It is getting close enough to the other person, just as the Samaritan did, that you can see and hear what distance keeps from you, close enough that you cannot hold yourself apart from it. Stevenson learned it first from his grandmother, who told him you cannot understand the important things from a distance, that you have to get close. The closeness he wants us to understand is the one Bauman described, the kind that implicates us in the lives of the people we have drawn near to.
This is a proximity that does not fit in a neat and tidy box. It is a nearness that will not let us keep our distance, that draws us toward people and doesn’t let us off the hook. It is the proximity the gift inclines toward and the one modernity has slowly engineered away, traded in for a version that asks too little of us.
What Draws Us Near
What we are after, in the end, is the truest sense of the gift, the version that asks something of the people it passes between rather than merely moving between them. As with each of the five conditions we will explore in this half of our project, we find that the gift is diminished without it. The first of those conditions is proximity. To recover the gift is to put proximity back where it belongs.
Do the proximate thing yourself. There is almost always a closer way to go about our work than the one we reach for first, and it is the nearer way that costs us what the distant one was designed to spare us. Not everything we have handed to the apparatus needed to be handed off. The apparatus cannot cross the road and it cannot get down into the ditch. The discipline is to keep asking what part of the work proximity actually asks of us and to make sure we do not surrender that part to someone, or something, else.
The danger is rarely that we hand off too much, but that we hand off the things that matter the most without understanding their importance. I can think of colleagues who rely on an assistant to book the meetings, a prospect researcher to do the prep work, and a copywriter to draft the thank-you so that by the time they sit down across the table they are the only ones who have invested no meaningful effort in knowing the person in front of them. Their boss would applaud them for being very good at closing deals. They are also remarkably skilled at creating the illusion of proximity rather than experiencing it. What they have missed is that proximity means investing in the relationship before we ask the other person to do the same.
Stick around rather than show up. The Samaritan’s crossing is where proximity begins, not where it ends. The parable does not stop at the roadside; it goes on to the inn, the paid bill, the promise to return. Appearing is the easier, legible half that our systems know how to track: the visit made, the event held, the gift received on time. To stick around is to let the bond outlast the moment we are credited for.
Sticking around is the harder half because it asks for the one thing the apparatus has the least of: time spent past the point of usefulness. Who among us has not shown up well and then quietly exited the relationship? Many of us know the pattern: a friend or neighbor loses a spouse, the meals arrive for two weeks and then stop, all of us having performed our sympathy on schedule and gone back to our lives. Only later do we learn that the silence in the third month was worse than the funeral, and that the bereaved had come to dread the casseroles, because eventually a casserole is just a Pyrex dish someone comes looking for.
Stay close enough to be changed. This is the proximity that asks the most of us because it is the one we cannot control. To stay near enough to be changed is to give up knowing in advance who we will be on the other side. Most of us can manage closeness so long as it leaves us intact; this asks for the kind of proximity that might not.
Most of what we have built is arranged so that we may pass close to a great many people in a day and walk away from each unchanged. This is one of the reasons I grieve over those who insist on keeping their giving anonymous. I understand their reasons, and some of them are good, modesty among them. But anonymity can also be a way of giving while staying out of reach, of sending help to people who can never come back to us with a story or a request. The exchange still happens, but the giver has ensured nothing about the experience changes who they are.
Guarding the Proximity
As we have learned, nearly everything that diminishes the gift is the consequence of one of modernity’s subtraction stories, a way of doing the work that removes its messiness and uncertainty. The practices above are how we add proximity back, the things we do to restore what was taken out. But practices alone are not enough. These practices also need constraints, ways of protecting the proximity they were meant to restore. These constraints have the effect of asking, of anything offered to us, not what it adds but what messiness or uncertainty it quietly removes.
Refuse what removes the weight. A great deal of what is sold to us is sold on its power to spare us the discomfort of the encounter, the awkwardness of the ask, the exposure of sitting across from someone who is free to say no. We are right that it is uncomfortable. We are wrong about what the discomfort is. It is not the problem to be solved; it is the sign that something is passing between two people who cannot pretend the other is not there.
Take the discomfort away and you take that connection with it, and we rarely notice the trade until it is made. I find it troubling how many platforms are now being built to mediate the relationship between a foundation and its grantees. As if subcontracting the proposals out had not diminished it enough, we now have technology on both sides that would use AI to negotiate the very terms of engagement. No humans involved.
Refuse to let the intermediary become the whole of it. This is not a refusal of help. Most of what carries the gift across time and distance is good and necessary; the database that remembers a donor’s history, the colleague who makes an introduction, the organization that turns a gift into a school all stand between giver and receiver in ways that serve the gift rather than swallow it. What we refuse is the point past which the thing that was meant to connect two people begins to replace them until there is no longer anyone left for either side to reach.
The hardest intermediary to see is ourselves. Very few of my fundraising colleagues see themselves this way, standing between the institution that pays them and the donors who believe in its work. I have heard the weariness from donors more times than I can count: assigned one gift officer after another, each gone within a year or two. We cannot understand that weariness until we stop pretending we are the relationship, and admit we are standing in the middle of one. Seeing ourselves clearly is what frees us to do the better work of an intermediary: to introduce people to one another, to build connections we are not at the center of, and then to step out of the way rather than hold everything to ourselves.
Refuse to act on the category. A category is what we put a person into so that we can act on many people at once: the donor segment, the gift level, the deserving and the undeserving, the lapsed and the active. It is useful and is how the work gets done at any scale. But a category is not a person; it is a description we have agreed to treat as one. To act on the category is to answer the description and never the someone underneath it, and this is the quietest failure because it never feels like turning anyone away. The category has no face to turn from. To refuse to act on the category is to reach past the description in favor of the person it was standing in for.
The work will almost never require this of us, and it is nearly the whole of what the gift asks. Olive Cooke’s generosity placed her on lists that were rented and traded until she was receiving thousands of appeals a year. When researching her story for my first book I recall discovering that, of the charities filling her mailbox, not one had ever reached out to have a meaningful conversation, to sit down with her for tea, to understand who she was as a person rather than a record in a database. To each of them she was a name with a giving history, a reliable donor on a file. It was the sector’s inability to see Olive as a person that is largely to blame for the events that unfolded after her death.
We Do Not Make the Gift
None of what we have outlined manufactures the gift; and it is worth saying so plainly because the moment we have a list of practices and constraints the temptation is to gather them into a program and run it, which would be one more way of engineering the work at arm’s length. The gift is not produced by a better system. It comes back when the conditions it needs are present again, and these practices and constraints are only possible ways of keeping those conditions present. Recovering the gift is mostly the work of restraint: putting proximity back where it belongs and choosing not to engineer what does not have to be.
But proximity is only the beginning of it. We can stand close to a person and still fail to see them, still take them in as a need, a case, a file, and never meet the person behind the category. Proximity opens the door; it does not walk us through. What it makes possible, but does not promise, is the encounter.
- Jason Lewis, Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed
This was the third essay in the second half of Taming the Gift, where the project turned from naming what has tamed the gift to recovering what might set it free. To learn more about the project, visit here.