On Gifts and Giving

Leaving the gym I heard the laughter of a child from the direction of a plaza ahead.  A giggling boy toddled into view and crouched to hide on the far side of the fountain.  His mother then appeared, acting her part of the charade, asking loudly where he might be and looking in all the wrong places.  He shrieked with joy as she neared and, laughing with each unsteady step, wobbled away, lost in the game.  She swept him into her arms and was on her way. As she disappeared around the corner he leaned back in her arms, eyes closed, melting with laughter, a picture of delight.

The privilege of watching the mother’s gift of love to her child struck me as a gift of the purest kind: one for which the giver expects in return nothing but the joy of giving.

We have our gifts, each of us, remembered or not, acknowledged or not, for which we owe nothing.  Like the toddler, the joy we find in life flows directly from them: life, health, family, relationships . . . everything.  And the glory of it is that we owe nothing.  

I’ve been slow to come to this insight.  I cringe to think of the abstemious and puckered ways of my youth, which with the peculiarities of my upbringing bred in me a reliance on self and a belief that all was my due.  I was blind to the truth of my good fortune: intellect, good health, and parents who loved me despite their many problems and distractions.  But I took it as my due until one day I learned differently.

The occasion was graduation from medical school, an unlikely event given the facts of my upbringing: child of a drug-addicted father and a sometimes drug-abusing mother, a modest high school academic record, and a lousy GPA my first two years in college.  That I was admitted to medical school still seems a miracle, a gift from heaven, but back then I just took it in stride as a happy occurrence, like winning the lottery.

In medical school I took odd medical jobs to stay afloat financially, but it was not enough and at a critical point, with no other alternative, I borrowed from a family friend. The debt was due a few years after graduation. After graduation I opened a letter and found the note marked “Paid in full.”  The accompanying letter urged me to “pay it forward,” my initial acquaintance with the phrase. 

The reality of such generosity was a shock, so different from the insubstantiality of Biblical passages about blessings and admonitions from Mother always to be grateful.  It was a concrete introduction to a new way of thinking about life.

To live without giving offers a joyless life of anxiety, granting mastery to possessions, to time, and to circumstance.  There is another way—give without thought of return, like mother to child. It will make you happy.

Thomas H. McConnell

June 14, 2003

Dallas, Texas