I know a person who lost every friend she had over stray cats.

Nobody was cruel to her. They were simply human. She had taken on the care of the abandoned cats in her neighbourhood, and somewhere between the first rescue and the hundredth, the work stopped being a labour of love and became a ledger. Who helped. Who didn't. Who promised and quietly failed. Who, given what they clearly had, ought to have done more. Ledgers never balance, and when hers didn't, the disappointment hardened. She began to see villains where there were only tired people carrying burdens she couldn't see. One by one, her friends withdrew. She called it betrayal. They called it exhaustion. I suspect both were telling the truth.

I have been around the charity world since I was a boy in my early teens. I have loved giving, and I have loved it most when no one could see it. That is when it is purest.

The traditions have always known this. The Prophet ﷺ spoke of the one who gives so discreetly that his left hand does not know what his right hand has given (Bukhārī; Muslim). Six centuries before him, Jesus said almost the same words: "do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret" (Matthew 6:3–4). The Qur'an tells us that charity given openly is good, but charity concealed and given to the poor is better (2:271). Maimonides, in his eight degrees of giving, places near the very top the gift where giver and receiver never learn each other's names, surpassed only by helping a person stand on their own feet. And the Bhagavad Gita calls a gift sāttvic, born of goodness, when it is given at the right time, to the right person, expecting nothing in return (17:20). Different languages, one instinct. The right hand should not testify.

And charity was never only money. Money is its crudest form. From the point of view of my own tradition, the Prophet ﷺ taught that your smile to your brother is charity, and that every act of goodness is charity. I put both into a song once, Healing: tabassumuka li-akhīka ṣadaqa, kullu maʿrūfin ṣadaqa. A kind word is charity. A beautiful scent shared is charity. Staying with someone who is drowning, when staying is all you can do, is charity. These are not small change. They are the whole purse.

But I would be lying to you if I stopped there.

I have also seen the other face of it. The endowment, the gift that outlives the giver, traces in my tradition to the Prophet ﷺ himself, who advised that a piece of land be held so it could never be sold, gifted or inherited, while its fruit went to the poor. An architecture built to outlast us. And I have watched that noble idea hollowed out: foundations that are really tax shelters, "religious organisations" that pay no tax and run exactly like companies with a more solemn name. Not all of them. Many do heroic work. But the counterfeit is common enough that people can taste it. The human being has always carried both the impulse toward the good and the shadow that walks beside it.

Still, what has moved me most over the years is not the fraud. It is the heartbreak.

I have watched good, sincere people give themselves to this work, to orphaned children in Palestine, to families in distant countries, to shelters and stray cats, and I have watched them come apart. It begins with love. Then expectation creeps in. They cannot understand why others do not burn the way they burn. They plead, and when help doesn't come, disappointment becomes frustration, frustration becomes bitterness, and bitterness becomes a quiet contempt for people. Friendships end over unreturned calls. Some fall into real emotional and spiritual crises. They become hard to be near, burning down the peace in their own homes to carry a weight that was never theirs.

At the root of it, I have come to believe, is one word: responsibility.

One of my teachers gave me an image I have never forgotten. You are driving at night and a deer steps into the road. You hit it. That deer is now your responsibility. You stop, you go back, you get it to a vet, you do everything you can, because it was placed in your path. But is it your responsibility to step off the highway, strap on a flashlight, and march into every forest across the continent searching for every injured deer in existence? No. To attempt that is not heroism; it is spiritual arrogance. It is a failure to recognize our limits as finite, fragile human beings.

This may sound like an excuse. It is the opposite. In my tradition, God is good, and we are asked to hold a good opinion of Him, ḥusn al-ẓann. One of His Beautiful Names is al-Razzāq, the Provider (Qur'an 51:58). The teaching I was given is this: provision is written. If a thousand is written for you, it will reach you whether you take the clean road or the crooked one. The amount was never the question. The road is. He provides for the orphan. He provides for the stray. We are not the source of anyone's provision. We are, at most, its agents, invited to give what we can from where we stand.

This is why the saints and sages carried a peace the rest of us struggle to reach. Not happiness, which comes and goes like weather, but sakīna, the settled heart. They were the kindest people imaginable precisely because they did not demand that the world meet their expectations. They fed the traveller at the door, tended the deer or stray dog/cat on their road, and left the rest to God.

So here is the lesson. I paid for it with years of watching, and I offer it to spare you the price. If you have the means to build something of your own, a foundation, an endowment, a garden whose fruit outlives you, build it. That is a privilege. But going door to door collecting other people's money, taking credit for the good it does, and then growing bitter when people can't meet your expectations is to build your own suffering and hand everyone else the bill.

Do what you can. Do it quietly. Expect nothing from people and everything from God. Keep a good opinion of Him first, and then of each other. Most of us are doing better than we know.

With love and gratitude,

Sami