escort diary® of Jolie: On gifts, and what they mean to me
I received beautiful piece of clothing this morning from a client who remembered, without me having mentioned it in weeks, that I had said, in passing, that I was trying to refresh my winter wardrobe for something elegant.
The top arrived wrapped this beautiful box with a note that said only: have a beautiful day. That was it, nothing dramatic, but enough that I just stared at the box, felt the attention running through me and felt incredibly grateful.
This is the thing nobody explains properly about gift-giving, and I think it is because we have collectively decided to pretend that the price tag is the point. It isn't. The price tag is occasionally involved, and I won't insult anyone's intelligence by claiming otherwise: there is a real and pleasurable recognition in being given something a person had to actually decide to spend money on.
That decision is part of the gesture, but it is not the gesture itself.The gesture is the act of having paid attention.
Here is what I mean: somewhere in that client's week, at some point between all the meetings and the emails, flights in the middle east and the small fires he was putting out in his own life, a neurological thing happened that I find genuinely moving when I stop to think about it.
A cue in his environment activated a memory of me.
A specific, detailed one: a conversation we had, the particular texture of my complaint about finding this period hard and not being able to treat myself to nice things.
His brain fired a small private signal that said she said something about this. She would want this. I am going to do something about it.That chain of events: the noticing, the remembering, the deciding, the acting, is, in my opinion, one of the most intimate things one human being can do for another.
It requires that he have been genuinely present in our conversation in the first place, which is rarer than it should be. It requires that his memory of me is detailed enough to have preserved a small offhand remark I probably don't even remember making. It requires that, at some point in his week, I existed in his mind as a specific person with specific interests and not as a category or a function or an appointment on his calendar. And it requires that he act on it, which, if you have ever had an idea for a kind gesture and then failed to follow through because life got busy, you know is the hardest part.
The sequence of mental events that led to it is the actual gift.I think this is what people mean, or what they're reaching for, when they say it's the thought that counts, a phrase that has been so thoroughly drained of meaning by overuse that I have seen it deployed in defence of some genuinely terrible presents.
But the instinct underneath the cliché is correct. The thought is what counts because the thought is evidence: evidence that someone held you in their mind when you weren't in the room, evidence that you exist to them as more than a context, evidence that the specific, strange, particular details of who you are registered somewhere in a way that produced action.
That evidence is what the gift actually delivers.
The object is just the vessel it arrives in.
