Pay it Forward
Notes From the Field, Cerrillos, NM
The guy didn’t make a big deal out of it.
I was on the Moto Guzzi, heading home on NM 14, pulling into the Lone Butte gas station. Afternoon light doing that high desert thing where everything looks a little too sharp to be real. My gas light had come on, and it’s the only gas for miles in either direction.
White contractor truck at the pump, guy standing there, nozzle in hand. I shut the bike off and he looks over and goes, hey, you need some gas?
I thought I misheard him.
He shrugs, says it’s a company card, already filled the truck and there’s still credit on the pump. I don’t know what to do with it.
So I pulled up and he filled my tank. We talked for a few minutes. Nice guy. Lived a little ways down the road from me. He had a daughter with a quinceañera coming up. He was proud about it in that quiet way fathers get. When the pump clicked off, he said pay it forward, got in his truck and left.
Couple weeks later I saw him at Beer Creek. Bought him a beer. Could’ve called it even. But I didn’t feel like I was returning anything. It felt more like stepping into something that was already moving.
This isn’t a one-time thing.
Bay Bridge, Oakland. I’m in my vintage FJ40, doors off, canvas top on, not exactly a fuel-efficient choice for sitting in toll plaza traffic. But here’s the thing about Bay Bridge traffic. Nobody’s going anywhere, so you might as well be somewhere. I kind of turned that drive into a mini daily vacation, just put on some music and stare out across the bay. Alcatraz sitting out there. Marin Headlands off to the side. The Golden Gate stretching across to the San Francisco skyline. Gorgeous. That view does something to you. Honestly, I think people would pay more than the toll just for the view. When I finally rolled up to the booth, the guy leans out and says the car in front of you already paid.
Total stranger. Already gone. I didn’t even see them to say thank you.
I’m at La Montanita co-op in Santa Fe. There’s a woman a couple people ahead of me at the register, her daughter next to her. Debit card won’t go through. She tries it again. You know that silence. The whole line knows. Before she can figure out her next move, the person behind her just says I got it. And before she can even form the word no, he’s already tapped his card. The look on her face was everything at once. Joy. Relief. Confusion. Gratitude.
Opuntia Café. I was covering the barista shift one morning, which I secretly loved. I’m a freak about milk temperature and texture. I make damn good latte art, especially when people don’t expect the owner to be back there. I was blowing minds, having fun, when the girl at the register leans over and goes, hey, listen to this. Some guy had come in earlier, put a hundred dollars on the counter, said cover everybody’s coffee until it runs out, don’t tell anybody who did it. So we were working through it one cup at a time. Every now and then somebody would take what they were going to pay and throw it in the pot, and it just kept going like that. I spent that whole morning watching the looks on people’s faces. Just watching that energy move through the room.
I don’t know what to call it exactly.
People call it karma. Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like that. Feels more like something that was already moving before any of us showed up to it.
Something passes through a person and keeps going. Sometimes it moves through you. Sometimes you just find yourself in the path of it.
I’m not sure it wants to be explained.
I walked out of Allsup’s with a chimi and no regrets. Yet.
For the uninitiated: the Allsup’s chimi is not a chimichanga. It’s a deep-fried burrito that was born in 1974 when somebody allegedly dropped a burrito into a donut fryer by accident and instead of throwing it out, New Mexico said yes. The outside is aggressively crispy, grease already soaking through the bag before you hit the door. The inside is molten. You think it cooled down. It didn’t. You bite anyway. You burn your mouth anyway. You keep eating anyway. The taco sauce comes in little packets you tear open with your teeth. Vinegar-heavy, slightly sweet. Then you dump all of it in through the hole you just made with your first bite. It’s both great and a mistake at the same time. I’ve had the filling blow out the side, burn and blister my chin, which was both gross and impressive. When people asked what happened, all I needed to say was Allsups Chimi. They understood completely. No judgment. No shame. This is New Mexico.
I was walking back toward the pumps, chimi in hand, trying to time my first bite, when I heard him.
There’s a beat up black Chevy truck at the pump next to mine. Guy on the phone with his wife, trying to figure out how to move money into whatever account was connected to whatever card he needed to get gas and get home. But there wasn’t really any money to move and they both knew it. Not a fight exactly. Just the way two people talk when they’re in a tight spot and out of options. At some point he switched over to his daughter, told her he’d be home soon. The look on his face when he said it said he wasn’t sure that was true.
I said hey, you need some gas? I got you.
Fifteen bucks. No drama.
He was grateful in that way people get when they’re relieved and a little embarrassed at the same time. Told me to come by his detail shop in Santa Fe sometime, he’d take care of my FJ Cruiser. I looked at the FJ. Mud on every panel, inside situation I won’t get into, doors that have their own opinions about opening and closing.
I didn’t say that out loud. But I thought it.
He said at least I’ll wash it.
People have been noticing this for a long time.
There’s a 9th century Sufi mystic named Hatim al-Asamm. Known for giving everything away. Someone finally asked him why. He said he was just returning what was never his to begin with.
If nothing was his to begin with, it was already moving.
The Lakota have a ceremony called Wopila. A giveaway. When something good comes, a healing, a son returning from war, a milestone, the family doesn’t receive gifts. They give them. They spend months collecting and making things. Blankets. Jewelry. Star quilts. At the ceremony they lay it all out and give it away, elders first, then veterans, then women, then children. One family gave away their radio, their television, their truck. Finally their house.
Warfield Moose Sr. said it simply: everything around you is a gift, and never forget where it comes from, your heart.
It doesn’t disappear, it moves.
In the Hindu and Buddhist traditions they share a word for this. Dana. Giving without holding on to what you gave. It was so fundamental that when the Buddha taught someone new to the path, he started there. The Taittiriya Upanishad says give with faith, give with sensitivity, give with a feeling of abundance. As if generosity was already your nature and you just needed reminding.
It only works if it keeps moving.
Jesus said you have to receive it like a child.
At some point it stops sounding like something you’re supposed to do. It just starts feeling like something that’s already happening.
The book of Proverbs says it this way: he who waters will also be watered himself.
You see it happen.
Jorge Moll at the National Institutes of Health put people in brain scanners and watched what happened when they gave. The same reward centers that light up for food and sex lit up for giving. And giving produced more activity than receiving money did. Your brain is hardwired to find giving pleasurable. Which doesn’t explain it. If anything, it makes it stranger.
It doesn’t stop at giving.
Antonio Damasio at USC studied the neural correlates of gratitude and found that receiving activates the same reward and social bonding regions as giving. The brain lights up on both ends of the exchange.
Maybe all of this isn’t random.
It starts to feel like something built in. Whatever set things in motion, it keeps showing up in people, in the way the body responds, in giving and receiving both. It was already here before we started trying to explain it.
And if that’s true, then maybe it says something about what’s underneath all of this. Something more than structure. Feels closer to care. Like whatever holds all of this together keeps it moving through both sides. What moves through you doesn’t diminish you. What comes to you doesn’t stop with you. It keeps things alive.
You could call it design. You could call it the field. You could call it love.
It’s hard to write off after a while.
Out here the rain doesn’t stay where it falls.
It comes hard during monsoon. Fast. Too fast for the ground to take it in. It runs through the arroyos, cuts lines through the dirt, disappears as quickly as it showed up.
A few weeks later things start turning green.
Not where the rain hit. Somewhere else. Downstream. Lower ground. Places that didn’t get touched directly.
The water moved. Went under. Showed up again.
That’s just how it works out here.
More soon,
Todd
Cerrillos, NM
(Where nothing out here stays where it lands.)
Pass this along to someone curious.
Thanks, dear man.
It is good and true to remember the heart fires the mind and Life can breath into being. Thanks