Gift-Giving

I have just finished reading 29 Gifts: How A Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by Cami Walker.I had picked it out at Borders and settled down on one of those armchairs to have a bit of a read and wow, I read all the way to Day 4 before I decided that I just had to buy this book. Actually I decided that after Day 1 but was so hooked I couldn't stop reading.

And the effect of the words was strange. I started noticing the gifts other people were giving me. For instance, before I settled down in Borders I had gone to an Apple reseller to get another iPod charger as mine was coming apart and no longer charged the pod. In short, it would have to be thrown away.

As I paid for the new charger, my wallet, which was overfull of coins, burst and spilled on the counter. The cashier watched me try to stuff it all back and then she said...look, do you want to change that into dollars?

Oh boy, did I!

And so I changed about RM6 worth of coins into six singles. Felt good. And now my wallet would actually button shut.

And when I went to pay for this book at Borders, I realised I had left my Borders card at home. Which meant I would not get the 10% discount. Oh well, I thought, resigning myself to that.

But when the cashier asked me if I had a Borders card, and I told her I did, she went through a lot of trouble verifying this on another computer (a lot of trouble because she took down my IC number wrong) and then gave me the discount anyway.

My second gift in as many hours.

As I strolled back to the office, I bumped into Rash, my colleague, who was heading for The Curve carpark to move his car to the office carpark. He examined my purchase and said he had flipped through 29 Gifts many times but never gotten around to buying it.

I asked if he would like to read it after I got done and he lit up at once and said yes. I had offered to lend him the two "I lost my job and found a life" memoirs that I had bought a few weeks ago, and other than looking really worried at my choice of reading material, he had declined the offer.

So that would be my first gift.

To lend the book.

And tomorrow, I'll tell you how you can do the 29 Gifts exercise by copying out the instructions by Mbali Creazzo...the medicine woman who passed on the exercise to Cami Walker. I would also seriously recommend the book and following Cami on the day-to-day journey.

It's lovely that in a time of so much bad news, there is the possibility of good news if we just shift our perceptions and get out of ourselves.

OK I'm not going to write out the one annual Deepavali card I send out every year to a friend and then go out in search of stamps so I can post it.

Toodles.