The beauty of giving “nothing.”

Today my sister turned 36 and got the Faroe Islands for her birthday, a few weeks earlier she gave me Svalbard (clearly we’re on a Scandinavia theme this year.) Rather than exchange gifts on holidays or birthdays, we started giving each other places — Darjeeling, Lake Maracaibo, a village in Spain I had never heard of.

The sentiment has far surpassed what the original, more monetary-based plan was: 1. Open shared bank account 2. Contribute money that would otherwise be used for gifts 3. Use said money to go somewhere together. We never followed through on any of the above, outside of what our cycle of place-exchange has become today — the act of giving each other excitement via lightly researched places, often with bulleted lists of things you can do there, and a single image.

It’s so simple, and sentimental, and interesting… I can’t remember the last time I said that about an actual gift now that I think about it. And the real kicker is that it costs nothing.

I could wrap this up with some prose about how the planet is flooded with useless garbage, that we’re all driven mad to consume, bombarded with strategic, manipulative advertising every minute of the day to do so, that there’s a societal guilt complex around giving and receiving “gifts”. This list could go on forever and I’ve had my fair share of remorse. I’ll simply leave you with Ténéré, once considered the location of the most isolated tree on Earth, sitting, solely, in the south central part of the Saharas.

“One must see the Tree to believe its existence.” — Michel Lesourd