I’ve talked about stealing gifts. Every gift is an investment in shared being with another. One member of a friendship gives something to another, who is to receive it, on behalf of the friendship. But that gift belongs both to the receiver and to the friendship itself. That mark of the dual ownership of a … Continue reading Gift thieves
I’ve been told by people I trust that if you’re too generous, people don’t value your gifts. Excessive generosity cheapens giving.
I’m giving a designer friend of mine a beautiful, perfect gift, and it’s got me thinking about gifts, again. I just looked up my old posts on gifts, and two of them have held up pretty nicely. Designs and gifts Don’t steal gifts
Design is like gift-giving. How? When one person gives another person a perfect gift, the gift is valuable in three ways: The gift itself is intrinsically valuable to the one receiving it. The giftis good to have in one’s life, because it makes life easier, more pleasant or more meaningful. The gift contributes to the … Continue reading Design as gift (edit for 10ke)
I was looking through the gratitude quotes in my wiki and saw this: Nobility and gratitude. — A noble soul will be happy to feel itself bound in gratitude and will not try anxiously to avoid the occasions when it may be so bound; it will likewise be at ease later in expressing gratitude; while … Continue reading Thanksgiving chord: gifts and gratitude
A listener who is considers his listening a gift is a shitty listener. Listening is only a gift if it is a genuine acceptance of a valuable gift. But, what if the gift of what is said really is not valuable? When a speaker ignores the listener and just talks about whatever it is that he … Continue reading Listening as gift
When I offer my service, this necessarily includes my time and my effort. My services, however are not reducible to time and effort. The most important element of service is something beyond time and effort and is the cornerstone of service. Unfortunately the homo faber type — the industrialist temperament — knows only a world … Continue reading Gifts of service
When given a gift, accept the gift. Do not steal it. * To take possession of the object of the gift as if it were merely a transfer of property is to betray the spirit of gift-giving. A gift is an exchange of humanity. The object is only the medium of exchange. The object is … Continue reading Don’t steal gifts
In honor of Hanukkah and Christmas, two great gift-giving holidays, this post is about gifts. * Agreement does not (only) mean correspondence of belief. More than that, it means compatibility of belief. It means the possibility of relationship in the medium of understanding, activity and purpose. A truly agreeable gift signals agreement in this expansive … Continue reading Designs and gifts
Lou Salome on the integration of contradiction in a perfect female soul: Just as motherhood is the only thing that offers the full experience, in its totality, of a human relationship, and, for this very reason, that can be ceaselessly renewed, woman receives from life the gift of new beginnings, in a way that man … Continue reading Thunder perfect Lou
Altruism without intuition of transcendence is sentimental idolatry. An intuition of transcendence requires consciousness of being conceived, comprehended, enveloped, embraced by layer upon layer of interlapping, ever-magnifying magnanimity approaching one soul of infinite magnitude, at once both absolutely one and infinitely plural. Chokhmah and Binah proceed from the principle of immanence the possibility of One … Continue reading Quantlocked
This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity: We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago. The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent … Continue reading An insincere exhortation
An internet rock-tumbled quote attributed to William James: When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.” Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.” Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.” The entire point of getting credit for a new idea is to … Continue reading Waa waa waa
From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies,” a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: … Continue reading Against pure transaction
I have connected design and gifts for a good while. When I understand the core service design concept of value exchange in the clear light of gift exchange, so that it includes, but also transcends, transaction, and enters the domain of freely given gifts, service design gains importance and universality. Let us define transaction as … Continue reading The Medium
The Trickster persona maintains an ironic dual focus. The second focus is the workaday foreground we all share with our peers and collaborators. The first focus — the one that really matters to to the Trickster — is the uncanny background of all activity, the formless formational forces who move, shape and illuminate and obscure … Continue reading Tricky life
I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design. In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at … Continue reading Value exchanges, sahib
The following are three emails about Scholem’s seventh aphorism, and about Biale’s apparent misunderstanding of that aphorism. I’m posting them mostly for myself, because there is some good clear thinking here, if you know the context. Email #1: I think what you are saying is true, but I am not sure you are saying anything … Continue reading More on Scholem’s seventh aphorism
Neshamah – the dimension of self who abides in Beriah, the World of Creation – is the self who hears the still, quiet voice of revelation through the thunderous noise of objective spectacle. Neshamah receives gifts of overwhelming meaning – both of creation and of revelation – ex nihilo. Ex nihilo – from Nothing. Nothingness … Continue reading Neshamah Yisrael
According to Wikipedia the expression “standing on the shoulders of giants” originated with William of Conches: The ancients had only the books which they themselves wrote, but we have all their books and moreover all those which have been written from the beginning until our time.… Hence we are like a dwarf perched on the … Continue reading Kill the giants