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This season is currently known as the most favourable for gift-giving – and gift-buying too. All around the Westernized world people are devoting...

This season is currently known as the most favourable for gift-giving – and gift-buying too. All around the Westernized world people are devoting some time to buying presents for those they care for out of personal, relational or commercial reasons ‒ sometimes they choose their gifts themselves, sometimes they pay someone else to do that. In this post, I would like to give my vision of what I consider a deeper and more period-suited vision of this habit. Being in love with linguistics, I will start from etymology.

     “Gift” is a word deriving from an ancient Indo-European root meaning “to give” but also “to receive”. In English it means “what has been given”: the first recording of the word dates back to the XIII century. The more modern meaning of “talent, good quality or skill” dates back to the following century. The other word that is commonly used in English as a synonym for “gift” is “present”; it derives from French and means more or less “something put into presence (that is: offered) before someone”. There is a subtle difference between the two words in legal jargon but for us commoners they are the same.

     What strikes me about the first word is its wider meaning. We may give and receive gifts of any kind – precious or cheap gifts, personalized or general gifts, funny or serious gifts, ready-made or hand-made gifts, tangible or immaterial gifts, as the case may be – but we may also be gifted. Gifted as in “she is a gifted writer” or “he’s the most gifted member of the family”. Gifted as a synonym of being “bestowed with talents”.

     We do not know but we all are bestowed with talents. Neither our school system nor Western society help us recognize that and we all grow with the idea that only rare and exceptional human beings can boast of having a talent. We call those special people “genius” and look at them as fortunate people who are eccentric, disorganized and entitled to do the strangest things no one else may do. Yet things are not like that.

     I repeat: we all are bestowed with talents. The amount of talents we possess is so vast and so diverse that making a comprehensive list would be impossible. The greatest part of our gifts goes unnoticed: who pays attention to the fact we are alive, for instance? Yet we could as well not be here. Who notices we can breath and walk and eat and lead what we consider a normal life? Yet when our body fails for some reason or we find ourselves in an impairing situation, we miss our previous condition and we strive to have it back.

     Trifles, you might say. I answer back: ask a dyscalculic person to do their maths and you will find it impossible, even if it is basic maths. Ask a stranger to speak your language as fluently as you do and you will see it is impossible. You might say: there are skills, not gifts. And I answer back: these are gifts. There is no reason for us to be the way we are. There is no reason we can do the things we can do. We might not have been born, might be born disabled, might have a different family in a different social and geographic context, might have an economic downfall or an accident or encounter one of the infinite possible causes not to be here as we are and we would not be the ones we are. We have no right to be the way we are, so everything we are is a gift. God-given or chance-driven, it matters little, since there are always bigger circumstances than ourselves that we cannot control or influence and we are free to call them the way we like best.

     Yet there is more than that. Let us go deeper, into where our true nature lies. We all are gifted with special qualities that are often kept hidden because our society does not value them. When it comes to qualities, there is no scale of values: all are important, all have the same rank, no matter what the world thinks of that. What do I mean by that? The special something only we can do our way. Our hand signature. Our je-ne-sais-quoi that makes us immediately recognizable as ourselves. Some secret talent. Something precious and delicate and relevant and distinctive without which we would not be ourselves anymore: our gift.
     Discovering that gift is no easy task. In our complex, fluid and often unjust society, looking rather than being is considered important, so our gift may stay unnoticed for a lifetime. It may be greatly visible. It may be tiny. It may be relevant to others. It may be something we can do just for ourselves. It may be something we can do for a lifetime. It may be a one-moment quality. Yet it is always a gift.
     This Christmas, why know considering a different form of gift-giving? Why not taking some time to listen carefully to what moves below our passing feelings, our worries and thoughts and find our what our git is? Why not using some time to nourish, deepen, improve this gift? This is not selfishness: believe it or not, when we discover our gift, we become better and we may even share our git with the others – if giving oneself to the other consciously and to the best of your ability is not gift-giving, please tell me what else is?
     Merry gift-giving season to everybody!