Gratitude, Receiving, & Giving
Wednesday Wisdoms for December 25, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
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Gratitude
🤨 Quote
“Among all our greatest and most numerous vices, none are more common than those that arise from an ungrateful heart.”
Seneca
Source: How to Give
Observation 🧐
Gratitude plays a major role within our everyday lives, but it is especially heightened around the holiday season where gift-giving is in abundance.
It’s easy to get caught up in the desire for things. It’s easy to compare and see what others get versus ourselves. But it is specifically this nature, Seneca says, this greediness, which prevents us from actually being grateful.
“It’s greed that prevents people from feeling grateful. What’s been given never lives up to our wanton hopes. We want more the more has come our way.”
Instead, focusing on the act itself, the fact that someone thought of us, helps to bring forth a sense of gratitude, of appreciation.
We’re reminded, most importantly, that someone else cared about us to give something.
🤔 Question
How do you handle receiving a gift? How does gratitude play into your emotions of it?
Receiving
🤨 Quote
“[If] Gifts and good deeds consisted in things rather than in the intent to do them, they’d be greater in proportion to the size of what we receive. But it’s not so.”
Seneca
Source: How to Give
Observation 🧐
How often do we compare ourselves to others? How often do we allow this comparison to hinder our actual enjoyment of giving and receiving gifts?
Seneca reminds that a gift or good deed is beyond what the individual receives, they are “generous acts, done in an eager and voluntary spirit, that bring joy, and also reap joy, from the act of giving.”
Too often we focus on what is being given but Seneca reminds us we need to look beyond the shiny paper and material item we’re being handed and remember it is the intention behind the gift. It is about “the attitude, since the gift is not the thing done or given, but lies in the heart of the one who does or gives.”
Why is this?
Because the gift that’s been given can neither be good nor bad, it is simply the judgment we place on it that is. It is in our heart that we decide the quality of what we’ve received.
“It’s the heart that elevates little things, brightens dingy things, or casts into dishonor what’s thought to be great and valuable. The objects of our yearning are in themselves neutral, neither good nor bad in essence.”
🤔 Question
As you receive gifts this holiday season, think about your emotional attachment to them. Are you applying a judgment or do you freely accept the gift?
Giving
🤨 Quote
“If someone helps me in order that through me he may help himself, he has not done a good deed, but only made me an implement of his own advantage.”
Seneca
Source: How to Give
Observation 🧐
Is your act of giving to build yourself or the person receiving the gift?
Seneca knew we had a habit of giving gifts for what they could do for us. He knew that gift giving was sometimes used as a way to gain favor, or to build oneself up.
But when is gift-giving to benefit oneself okay and when is it not?
When Galileo discovered Jupiter’s moons, he was a struggling scientist, his work dependent on the monetary donations of the rich of the time, which in turn made his livelihood unsteady and at the whims of the wealthy, including the Medici family, one of the wealthiest in all the land.
In of order to ensure he could continue his work and would have the means to do so, he told the Medici family that the discovery of Jupiter’s four moons, which matched the four members of the Medici family, was proof of their cosmic ascendancy.
Galileo would take his gift a step further and commission an emblem of the discovery. It displayed Jupiter atop a cloud with the four stars circling about and was presented to the family as proof that they were entwined with the divine.
Years later, the Medici’s would make Galileo the court philosopher and provide him full salary, making him one of the steadiest scientists of the time and ensuring his work could continue.
By gifting them this discovery, Galileo was able to continue his research and change the world forever.
But it came at the price of giving a gift for the benefit the giver rather than the receiver.
🤔 Question
When gift-giving, what do you think about? Do you randomly gift or do you think about the individual and what they would enjoy?
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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