why let your gifts get taken away?
First, the guy to my left, Somik, shared a story about his New Year’s Eve – spent at a hospice with a monk. He described two of the elderly men there who repeated the same phrases to him. One repeated asked him, “Are you Eli? Are you Eli?” The other reached out to him and just kept saying, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” He had done nothing to induce conversation with any of these people, and it was clear that they had lost some mental capacity that they once had.
The monk took Somik to the side. “So many of us live long enough to watch as our gifts are slowly taken away. Wouldn’t it be something if we could spend our years giving them away?”
I don’t know what it was, but something about that story hit me so hard. I teared up for a few seconds, but I was next in the sharing circle so I needed to step it up and share like a man. The idea of giving away your gifts is something that really resonated with me, and that’s something I really want to be more conscious of this year.
