Just Because.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

I am about as good at starting blogs as I am at starting conversations with strangers. It’s like I really don’t know what to say after “hello.” If I can’t identify immediately with some sense of common ground, it feels like I’ve committed to run a marathon with my shoes on the wrong feet. And so I wait or come up with a list of really good reasons to not write or not talk. I take notes constantly. Voice memos, scratches on napkins, sentence fragments in my phone. My notes center around details and are fueled by wondering what part of someone else’s humanity feels true in my own life. There is a subtle envy there, that perhaps I am missing a vital piece of information that someone has already integrated seamlessly into their lives. That envy is counterbalanced by a curiosity as to how someone’s life led them to this exact moment and this precise place.

Recently, a man sat next me on the plane from Atlanta to Philadelphia, and my eyes were almost magnetically attracted to his left wrist. Peeking from underneath his grey track jacket was a braided bracelet made of rainbow colored yarn. It was worn in a brave sort of contrast with his polished metal wedding band.

Toward the end of the flight, I decided to speak up, and I told him I liked his bracelet. My thought was, “If I had a kid who made me something like that, I would love to have an excuse to publicly dote on him or her.” Sure enough, he opened up.

He said that on a recent trip, he had been caught in the polar vortex, which delayed his flight. There is no way to dance around the fact that flight delays suck. Modern travel is nothing short of a miracle, but when it fails us, everyone from Odysseus to this man in 4C would give just about anything to be back home with the ones they had to leave. This desire to get back to his family coaxed him into abandoning his flight amidst the continental storm and renting a car to drive the 8 hours home, rather than wait for one more delay. This story reached the ears of his daughter, and before he could get on a plane for the next week’s journey, she gave him a present: a bracelet, and a wish that this next trip would run smoother.

I have had the pleasure to be on the receiving end of so, so many gifts, from birthdays to anniversaries. But I think my favorite gifts are the “just becauses.” The ones that encourage you not to recall a time or a place, but a person. A conversation. A brief moment of true connection to punctuate our routines and deadlines and travels and missed connections. The gifts that can only be given once, and because they can never be replicated, they hold limitless value.

I want to get better at giving gifts—to scare away the mundane, to firmly crease dog-ears into the pages of our timeline. We force ourselves to remember that other people out there have their own unique network of friends, neighbors, and coworkers. They have their own moments of feeling significant or vulnerable. We are acknowledging that our questions are asked in good company. We fill each other with the time and tokens we offer, and each present can be a symbol of continued presence. A gift is the manifestation of the hope that you would realize you are not alone.

With each passing birthday, holiday, or even “just because” days, I’ve gradually stopped caring so much about what others can tangibly offer me and have instead embraced the challenge of redefining what a gift may be in the first place. Every smile, every laugh, every thumbs-up to a passing biker, every high-five to an also delayed flight staffer—these are gifts. We can give, and we can receive. We can imagine and immerse. We can choose to see kindness as the true currency of our condition. (Tweet This)