I’m trying get back to intention. It sounds like such an easy thing to do when you say it. Slow down. Try to be more meaningful. Try to connect more. Not only with other people or yourself but also where you’re going and what you’re doing. But the fact is life is so crazy busy and it moves so crazy fast. And before you know it, even though you’ve known your friend’s birthday for 40 years, you still hardly manage to get a card in the mail and sometimes fail at that completely and leave a voicemail or publicly proclaim your love for her through a birthday message on Facebook so you’re only partly lame and not all the way lame. And yet I know the truth. That this still makes me all the way lame.
But I’m trying to get away from that. I’m going to try to get away from sending gift cards or having things delivered by Amazon Prime and get back to the good old days when you considered your person as you looked for something significant and especially for her.
So that’s what this is. A gift is a special thing. You open it with anticipation. You hold things in your hand that someone chose with you in mind. Gifts are experiences. Both the giving and receiving of them. And I’m looking to put more experiences into my day in place of the harried hurrying from here to there, checking boxes and to-doing until I pass out. I’m also looking to enrich my relationships with the people I love and that can be challenging when you live in an entirely different country. But this … gifting … is one way to make efforts in both of those arenas.
This entire gift cost under 50 dollars. And maybe if practicality is what you’re after, then maybe sending 50 bucks, instead, is the smarter option. But if birthdays are for cake and balloons and wishing on candles and wearing pointy hats why do we have to go the way of sensibility when it comes to the gift we give?
Why can’t that also carry with it a bit of whimsy, indulgence and something special? Something intended to be extra. Life is so full of demands for our pragmatic side. Let the giving of gifts be a welcome holiday from that, and give special things, wrapped in special ways. So that the gift becomes an experience and something to be remembered, rather than some cold cash or a gift card that sends them to the store.
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