The Gift

                                                                     

We always face this question. “What gift should I get for him/her?” This has a myriad answers. Each answer is correct and yet not correct. To truly justify this question with an appropriate and fulfilling answer it is necessary to understand the purpose a gift should serve. A gift can be something that satisfies a need, something that brings pleasure or something that serves as a reminder for the good times when surveyed upon in the future. A gift can be considered to be a temporal marker of something good in our life. A gift does not come alone. It brings with itself its own unique set of emotions and memories. So the act of choosing a gift for someone is not to be trifled with.

      This leads us to where we started from i.e. what to gift someone. In the present situation, in the current state of affairs one usually goes with something that is truly materialistic viz a card, an ornament etc. To be fair to these gifts they are actually pretty good at serving their purpose. However, I beg to differ. For me the most valuable thing that you can gift a person is your time. Few moments from your life that you willingly choose to take from your carefully measured out life and share with someone. A flower has life. An ornament has life. A card has life. Everything decays except memory. Those precious moments that you spend with a person never decay. Memory of those moments will not be touched by time. Also this gift wouldn't leave you bereaved; this is a gift for both the intended receiver and the donor. The memory stays with both the parties involved.

    Consider also the value of time. In the present scene we are most miserly with not money but with our time. We budget our time most. We are excruciatingly finicky about the allocation of our time for someone. This budgeting is for the people around us and the objects are exempt from it. This reinforces the idea of “Time” being the most cherished gift.

    Down the road it is not the objects we hold close to our chests but such moments that define the relationship that we have with those dear to us. Picture a death. Sad but necessary to showcase my point. What death signifies is a severing of ties; a crushing end to all prospects/hopes of spending time together. On each death and loss the biggest lament that possesses us is that we didn’t get enough time together. This is not the case. We have our time measured out in the ledger of life, it is upto us to credit moments or money. The balance is ours to accumulate and ours to enjoy.

    So the next time you have immersed yourself in work and someone buzzes, take out time. Entertain them, indulge them. 

    Create a memory .