I give, freely and often, to people and causes I choose.

What changed was not my willingness to give but my understanding of what giving is.

Giving is a choice, an act of will, a gift freely offered and freely withheld; and the moment it becomes automatic, expected, owed, it stops being generosity and becomes something else, a tribute extracted rather than a gift bestowed, and it corrodes both the giver and the taker.

It corrodes the giver, who is slowly drained and slowly resented for not giving more.

And it corrodes the taker, who learns, fatally, that the world owes them, and so never builds the muscles that only necessity builds.

My three years of automatic generosity had not been kind to Bristol; it had crippled her, taught her that a yacht was her birthright and work was for other people.