Dr George John

“For it is in giving that we receive” – St Francis of Assisi

“The gift of truth exceeds all other gifts” – Buddha

Each year as Christmas and Diwali approach presents are under the Christmas tree and gifts are exchanged with family and friends, but we seldom wonder what gifting really means. During the successful Platinum jubilee of the late HM Queen Elizabeth II, it was reported that people sent her majesty gifts. What motivates someone to send gifts to the Queen?

A gift is something given without payment or expectation of anything in return. The value of an appropriate, timely and thoughtful gift given with love is unquantifiable while some duty-driven gifts may prove worthless if it doesn’t represent the right sentiments.

Although Christmas and Diwali have nowadays, become reduced to mere festivals but they are still seasons of goodwill and its cherished gift-giving traditions speaks about relationships. In its very essence the happiest are those who give, because giving liberates their souls. The manner of giving is often worth more than the gift itself as the art and grace of giving can mean so much more. Gift-giving is part of every culture and the quality of the gift depends on the sincerity of the giver. If you want joy, give joy. If it is love that you seek, offer love. If you crave material affluence, help others to prosper. “No one has ever become poor by giving” said Anne Frank in her famous diaries and the greatest gifts don’t come gift-wrapped. Instead they are wrapped with love. In Deepak Chopra’s seven spiritual laws of success, the law of giving comes second only to the law of pure potentiality which include all possibilities and infinite creativity.

It is said that the universe operates through dynamic exchange and giving and receiving are therefore different aspects of this energy flow. Our willingness to give that which we seek, keeps the abundance of the universe circulating in our lives. In other words, “You cannot keep it, if you don’t give it away” because enshrined in the act of giving, are altruistic motives and initiatives. But what is the philosophy behind philanthropy?

Professor Peter Singer, the moral philosopher of Princeton University by his 1972 essay ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ inspired a large number of people to pledge to give away 10% of their income annually for the rest of their working lives to the most cost-effective charities operating in what is condescendingly called the “Third World” countries. This sort of gesture originally came from the organisation, Give What We Can (GWWC) founded by the Oxford scholar, Toby Ord. The Singer advocacy of an ascetic lifestyle does not appeal to everyone. But if you tone it down to more realistic levels of altruism, it will begin to make sense. That implies that as long as there are people living in poverty elsewhere, who we can help, we ought to give until we reach the level of ‘marginal utility’. That is the level at which, giving more would cause as much suffering to the giver as the gift would relieve the suffering of the recipient. Not everyone want to live below a certain level of comfort and by working out the lowest level of income by which one can live happily, one is achieving one of the truest forms of Gandhianism and Spirituality.

Some are content by what they get and there are others who strive to make lives of others better by their philanthropy. The greatest gift one can give is one’s time because in giving your time, you are giving a portion of your life that you cannot get back. There are big gifts and small gifts, but the biggest of them all are the ones that come from the heart. Christmas is more about opening our hearts than about opening our presents. Pope Francis reckons that God never send gifts to anyone who is incapable of receiving them. He who does not have Christmas in his heart will never find it under the Christmas tree.

Small gifts are better than great promises. Gifts only become meaningful, when they contain a slice of sincerity and a measure of integrity and that recipe cannot be bought or measured. Refinement of gifting defines its largeness and its tenderness just as Japan’s greatest tea master; Rikkyu-No-Sen established a tradition in which the host who invites a friend to tea decorates the room with a spray of blossom and a chosen inscription that celebrates their friendship.

The Latin saying ‘Bis dat qui cito dat’ (He gives twice who gives quickly) is about the timeliness of giving and Dr Samuel Johnson famously wrote: ‘Let him that desires to see others happy, make haste to give … every moment of delay takes away something from the value of his benefaction’.

But gift-giving becomes complicated when gifting to the prickly and suspicious person. Although free at the point of receipt, a gift which creates obligation is a ‘gift-with-a-hook’ and will prove too costly for the recipient.

Gifting is not a positive experience every time either. It can be a painful experience to try to give gifts to the ill-graced who resent our system of ceremonial giving and receiving at festive seasons because they suspect a concealed hook in every gift. But for most of the rest of us who find the experience of gifting warming and charming, the givers feel better-disposed towards the receivers and vice versa.

Is it because they say that yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery while today is a present that giving anything less that our best to others, can turn out to be a wasteful sacrifice? Notwithstanding the principle of the excellence of any gift being in its appropriateness rather than its value, when accepting a gift we may also get to like the giver more than the gift.

Kahlil Gibran explained that generosity of giving is not in giving someone something that both you and they need. Instead it is in giving that which you need more than they do. When the gifts of compassion and love are given freely, they are sure to be returned.

Gifts of friendships are different in that friends are gifts that we cultivate for ourselves. The easiest people to please with a gift are those who have wide interests and an enthusiasm for life, although such people are not plentiful. A sobering thought about gifting is that sometimes although you think you know what you have given, it need not necessarily mean that you will know what the recipient has received, because intentions can be misread unless you know the recipient well. It will serve us well to remember to exercise caution when engaging in the morally grey area of re-gifting an unwanted gift so as to avoid severe embarrassment by absent mindedness to remove the signature of the original gifter.

(Author is a retired Emeritus Consultant Psychiatrist from the UK now residing in Kochi and is a freelance essayist.)