Give > Receive
Our parents or grandparents taught us this principle, often in the middle of our requests for some grand thing.
At the time, we probably didn’t hear it or felt it was a cop out or distraction technique to change the subject from the thing we begged for.
“Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
To say I didn’t understand his urging-that giving was somehow better than receiving -is an understatement.
If you’re like me, this puffy, patriarchal principle seemed something passed down from another time, an age gone by. A time when things were scarce, not plentiful. A time when pictures were black and white, not color, and things were hard to come by, not easy to accumulate like they were in my childhood (and easier than ever now). To me, this advice was from a bygone time marked by saving everything and “making due” (whatever a 9 year old could make of that strange phrase), and of a long, faraway look in my grandfather’s eyes when he thought perhaps too much of those hard, lean times when he was a boy.
(But perhaps, they are times more and more of us may be facing again)
Of course, this proverb’s lesson, as they are wont to do, seems to sweeten and perfect itself over time.
