inbox/outbound.
I finally received this notification in my inbox,
Congratulations! You have been accepted to MassArt’s Spring 2009 travel course: Peru from Pre-Columbian to Contemporary. In addition, you have been awarded a Travel Course Scholarship of $1750.00 towards the travel fee…
Now, I have 8 months of waiting to do.
a Gift.
If you are given a gift, do you feel guilty?
A conversation was started today about how giving a gift to a person can automatically lead to them feeling guilty. Regardless of the intent of the giver, some people have it ingrained in them to feel bad; whether they feel like they do not deserve a gift or they feel like they in turn owe the gifter something I am unsure. I do think there is some underlying feeling of obligation from the receiver and that is what creates the unease.
Someone brought up how a gift is something that is given to make someone happy, cheer them up, or even just because you were thinking of the person. I enjoy doing things for people, and while it is not always in the form of an actual gift, I feel that through being thoughtful or engaged in the people around us we can lift whatever is weighing them down for a brief moment by our actions.
The thought of a gift being an obligation is something I do not necessarily disagree with, but I do not look at that obligation as something that is negative. If in someway we are obligated because we received a gift, I like to look at it as maybe we are obligated to our community [our friends, the people we pass daily, or even people we have brief encounters with throughout the day] to pass along something that can ease the burden of everyday life. The simple gesture of a smile, or engaging in an actual conversation, or acting outside of our personal bubbles can make a huge difference in the way people feel about what is going on around them.
This is not meant as some “love thy neighbor” hippy bullshit kinda spiel. Just being aware that giving a lil bit of ourselves to others is a positive thing within the communities we are a all part of.
(parentheses)
“The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses.” John Irving.
