Gifts to Myself

The great­est gifts I give myself have noth­ing to do with money or things. My day is punc­tu­ated with them. I thought I would share a few things on my per­sonal self-gift list with you, so you might see a few to add to your list too. Here is one: The gift of not hav­ing to be right. This is one of my favorites. It low­ers stress and keeps me out of all sorts of argu­ments. This is espe­cially true in the cur­rent era of arm­chair ana­lysts that pon­tif­i­cate on all sorts of sub­jects with­out ever crack­ing a book. Since they are right on every­thing, I don’t have to be. That is their bur­den — not mine.

I have also learned how to give myself the gift of time. I gave myself four extra min­utes in bed this morn­ing. Those four min­utes will go a long ways toward my atti­tude today. I used those min­utes to do absolutely noth­ing. Sev­eral times today, I will do that again. That’s right! Every so often I will take a few min­utes to do noth­ing. From that gift to myself comes all sorts of clar­ity of purpose.

I don’t dance for oth­ers. That is the way I tell myself that I do not have to live up to the expec­ta­tions of oth­ers. I acknowl­edge their pref­er­ences, then smile and just go ahead and do what I choose to do. They need to be heard but not nec­es­sar­ily obeyed. I do a lot of this with gov­ern­ment and busy­work insti­tu­tional forms too. They get their dose of mean­ing­less infor­ma­tion and a nod from me…and that is about it. I have a life to live and there is more to it than stuff­ing some­one else’s files.

Here is another one of my favorites: Loose fit­ting clothes. This may come as a shock, but I am not audi­tion­ing for the cover of GQ mag­a­zine. Com­fort­able cloth­ing some­times bor­ders on sloppy. I have lost a few pounds lately and will wait until I can almost turn around inside my clothes before going to a smaller size.

Here are a few more gifts: I gave up per­fec­tion­ism for Lent one year and never picked that bad habit up again. I quit wor­ry­ing about my health and whether I make it through the day alive. I stopped hav­ing imag­i­nary finan­cial goals (how much I think I should have in the bank). It no longer mat­ters where I live or what I do. I am alive. That one fact in and of itself is enough to jus­tify any other gift I give to myself as well.