The Gifts We Give

"You know what I find odd?" I asked.

We sat on a swing in the courtyard, surrounded on all sides by ancient, ivy covered buildings. This little courtyard of ours was hidden amongst labyrinthine side streets, packed shopping centers, and perpetually crowded avenues of our city, a city which never knew silence in all its years, a city which had never felt the touch of serenity, except for in our secret courtyard. Here, we were shielded from the chaos, protected from the frantic shells of men and women desperately trying to live while they suffocated under the weight of the endless drudgery of slogging through life, going through the motions in a manner that could hardly be called living.

Our swing hung from the branches of an old weeping willow, its long fronds motionless in the warm summer air, like the curtain in a stifling theater that closes after a long performance, once more confining its sweat drenched, but smiling performers to the sweltering heat of the backstage. Across from us sat a several square-shaped ponds, trimmed with simple gray stone and connected by channels which snaked across the garden like an ancient river. These ponds were home to a small family of ducks, who paddled from pond to pond, floating torpidly through sunbaked lilies and shimmering minnows whose bodies glittered like stars, their scales like a million tiny suns which created rainbows of color in the water. A small, wood-slat bridge ran from one end of the largest pond to the other, allowing passersby to dip their fit in the cool water should they be so inclined. The fish would often come to nibble on the toes of strangers, cleaning the bacteria and dead skin off of the tired feet of their human patrons.

"What?" She asked. Her hair was waist-length this August, but today it was pooled behind her head on the ancient wooden swing's headrest, like liquid gold seeping through the gaps of a cracked mold. Her cheeks were flushed in the heat, and her green eyes seemed like palm fronds as they glistened lushly, mirroring the leafy appendages of the weeping willow around us.

"The phrase 'you have a gift.'"

The words hung in the air, like steam in a sauna, floating across the still surface of the water, past the heads of our web-footed friends, before swinging their way up the ivy of the surrounding builds and bobbing off towards the distant clouds.

"What do you mean?" She asked.

"Well, I guess it's really more about how we interpret it."

"When someone tells us that we 'have a gift,' we always think of it as some divine endowment which has been bestowed upon us, in part by providence, in part by happenstance. We see it as something received, to be treasured by us, the receiver."

She nodded, but her eyes betrayed her confusion, and yet, she still smiled. She always smiled when I began to ramble.

"It's odd, because I've always interpreted it completely differently. When we have a gift, it's something that we give to other people. Take the violinist, Itzhak Perlman. He has an incredible gift for music, but it's not something that he guards. The gift is not his, but something that he gives to the world. He takes this gift and uses it to bring happiness and joy to everyone that hears him."

Her smile had become as radiant as the sun itself, sweltering like the heat of the day, exploding outwards like a solar flare, encompassing me as if I were a passing comet, easily consumed by the overwhelming beauty of our solar deity.

"I like that," she whispered. "Our gifts are not ones that we receive, rather the gifts we give."