The Danger in Reciprocity

Her wide eyes and smile suddenly faded as some realization swallowed it. The gift in her hands that had brought her so much happiness as she tore through the wrapping now felt like a weight in her palms as her eyes met mine. "I don't have a gift for you." Her words fell from her mouth like a judge's sentence against her. 

But I simply shrugged "No worries." I said, smiling. "You didn't have to get me anything."

A sudden face shift from disappointment to confusion. "Really?" 

"Yeah...really." I replied. I watched the weight of her own inner condemnation lift from off of her shoulders. I reassured her "You being happy about that is all the gift I need."

Following that exchange between my friend and I, I got to wondering why she could have felt that way. Why do any of us feel that way, guilty about gifts that we don't have to exchange when someone presents us with a gift? This feeling wasn't too foreign from my own emotional sphere. I have felt this way before, especially on Christmas.

But why? Reciprocity isn't necessarily a bad or good thing. It's a necessary thing. It is the "give-and-take" rhythm of our everyday. In good business, fair exchange is essential to positive commerce. If I want something, I have to pay a person for it. In a successful law system, crimes are judged and sentences are appropriate. If someone breaks the law, they must do the time for their crime. 

Simple, right?

But what happens when reciprocity invades areas of our lives where it never belonged. What happens when too much give and take moves into spectrums where it wasn't invited?

Things get confused. Yet this is how we approach a lot of our lives. We are friends with a person or date (or worse, marry) someone because they make us feel good, forgetting that this flawed persons will do or say something that won't make us feel so good. And then what? This reciprocal feeling upon which we hinged the totality of the relationship now seems to shakes a structure. Where reciprocity was only supposed to have a background role, we made it the star of the cast.

This what happens in our gift giving. We make too much room for reciprocity. A lot of times, it has very little to do with the other person. Sometimes we treat gift giving as a bartering, as though we are exchanging goods for goods like our ancestors of long ago. It's routine and mechanized. But then we miss the sweetness of the thoughtful present; that someone took time out of their lives and some of their treasure to find something they thought we would appreciate. 

Sometimes it could it be our own inner pride, a beast that's only content when it's pet and stroked by doing something well, including gifting. It destroys our pride when someone gives us something and we have nothing to exchange. We panic. We look around to see if we have an extra something, anything, just so we don't have to be empty handed. Not so much to spare the person giving us the gift's feelings, but to spare us of our own loss in pride.

After all, not having a gift would be humiliating, right?

But what if it isn't humiliating at all? What if the person giving the gift has no need of anything in return?What if reciprocity was taken completely out of the gift giving process and people just gave, whether they received something back or not?

After all, this season is really not about the gifts we receive. It's about what we give. 

After all, despite Santa, Rudolf, and Frosty, the shopping, the parties, the sales, and the other shallow nonsense brought on Christmas, remember the only reason there is even a Christmas Season. It is a celebratory reminder of what was given to us over 2000 years ago by a birth so unique, that it divided time, changed the course of human history and is still to this day one of the most mysterious and scandalous stories ever told. A little baby was born in a sheep pen to an engaged couple. And with the birth of that little baby, we were given one of the most lovely, wonderous gifts of all: Hope.

We could be missing that miraculous hope as we get lost in mundane reciprocity. Personally, I would rather have the hope of Christmas rather than the normal give and take of our everyday. How we celebrate that hope, whether with a Christmas tree, gift exchanges, community service, or what have you, the most crucial thing we can do is not receive, but to spread and share that hope.