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The art of receiving
Receiving is harder than giving, but can lead to even greater personal and spiritual growth.
During a visit to Paris, my mother bought me a gift and dropped it in the mail. I didn’t receive it very well. I tore away the brown paper packaging and, at the first sign of pink, let the package fall to the floor. She had sent me a gray cotton scarf with pink flowers. Pink.
When I told my friend Inge about the present, she squinted at me and curled her lips. “Doesn’t she know you don’t wear pink?”
Inge is a 70-year-old artist from Europe, tall and long-fingered, practical and willowy. She usually dresses in black and white, or the occasional beige. I met her only a year ago, but she seemed to know something about me that my mother didn’t.
In Inge’s gray, granite kitchen, waiting for tea water to boil, we discussed possible responses to the scarf, including accepting it with false appreciation, accepting it but not speaking much about it or returning it so my mother might learn my taste. As we spoke, I felt, in turn, disappointment, indignation, anger and loneliness.
Inge sympathized. “I’m a terrible receiver,” she said, passing me a bowl of organic cacao beans. “The chances that someone’s going to give me something I want or need are just too slim, and I don’t like feeling trapped between the obligatory ‘Thank you’ and the instinctive ‘Take it back.’ So I just told people to stop giving me things, even on holidays.”
I carried the bowl onto the sun-warmed patio, and placed it on her picnic table—white aluminum covered with an old kilim rug that provided a red-and-brown backdrop to a plate of homemade frosted sugar cookies, a bowl of Turkish candy, nut bread and oversized cream-colored porcelain teacups. Inge followed me out and stared at the table, wondering where to place the teapot in the crowd of offerings. “I might be a terrible receiver, but I’m a pretty good giver,” she said, voicing my thoughts.
Giving and receiving are fundamental aspects of experience, connecting all life in an interdependent whole. Just as many of us long to experience moments of pure altruism, when we offer our hearts with no strings attached, we also long to receive deeply and freely, fully experiencing what it means to be given to—touched, nourished and even transformed by life.
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Hello, ConversationAgent Twittered this and I'm grateful to receive it! What a wonderful and timely article. I think many of us just accept the notion that people SHOULD know what we like or don't like (especially our moms) and if we released that we'd feel freer to receive in general... I know it's not just about gifts; sometimes we need to receive opportunities or ideas or feelings - even if we feel we can't reciprocate... it could be that our acceptance inspires the giver to give more - and feel fulfilled by that. Maybe the third or fifth or tenth receiver is the one destined to give that person exactly what they have been dreaming of... we may never know ... All these social media formats have allowed people to give and receive from people they may never meet - it's a marvelous time to be alive! Thanks for such an inspiring read, Veronika
posted by dotcalm on 11/30/2008 10:22 am