Bob Schwartz

Tag: gift

December 1, 2025

Not caring about receiving gifts or not receiving gifts

Buddhism identifies eight paired worldly and mundane concerns:

Receiving gifts—Not receiving gifts
Fame—Disrepute
Praise—Criticism
Pleasure—Pain

It is advised that attachment to any of these will result in suffering, for yourself and others. You don’t have to be involved in any tradition, just as a human being, to know that is true.

Concern about receiving or not receiving gifts has other facets. Concern about receiving the “wrong” gift, or concern about whether to give a gift or about giving the “wrong” gift.

This is the season for receiving and giving gifts. This message is not about receiving or not receiving or giving or not giving gifts.

You may receive gifts and give gifts. You may be famous or disreputable. You may win praise or be subject to criticism. You may feel pleasure or pain. This is life. The holidays are on their way.

This season, clinging to concerns about what you receive will not make you and others happy. The empty box, or even no box at all, is okay.

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December 28, 2017

The Last Gift

Consider the gift you give to the one you love as the last one you will give.

What does it say?

“Even such a brief précis of the work that has been done on gift exchange should make it clear that we still lack a comprehensive theory of gifts….I touch on many issues, but I pass over many others in silence. With two or three brief exceptions I do not, for example, take up the negative side of gift exchange—gifts that leave an oppressive sense of obligation, gifts that manipulate or humiliate, gifts that establish and maintain hierarchies, and so forth and so on….I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or fear, nor those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us.”
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

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